Trouble Is My Business
Raymond Chandler
eBook
Chandler, Raymond (1950). Trouble is My Business. Vintage Books, 1988.Chandler, Raymond (1962). Raymond Chandler Speaking. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker, eds. Houghton Mifflin. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-520-20835-3.Chandler, Raymond, (1969). Forward by Powell, Lawrence Clark. The Raymond Chandler Omnibus, Borzoi Books.Day, Barry, (2015). "The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words". Vintage Books.Hiney, Tom (1997). Raymond Chandler: A Biography. Grove Press.Pronzini, Bill; Jack Adrian (eds). (1995). Hard-Boiled, An Anthology of American Crime Stories, Oxford University Press.In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of four of his short stories, Chandler provided insight on the formula for the detective story and how the pulp magazines differed from previous detective stories:The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.Chandler also described the struggle that writers of pulp fiction had in following the formula demanded by the editors of the pulp magazines:As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.[21]Critics and writers, including W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming, greatly admired Chandler's prose.[8] In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming said that Chandler offered "some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today".[22] Contemporary mystery writer Paul Levine has described Chandler's style as the "literary equivalent of a quick punch to the gut."[23] Chandler's swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett, but his sharp and lyrical similes are original: "The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel"; "He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips"; "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts"; "I went back to the seasteps and moved down them as cautiously as a cat on a wet floor." Chandler's writing redefined the private eye fiction genre, led to the coining of the adjective "Chandleresque," and inevitably became the subject of parody and pastiche. Yet the detective Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical tough guy, but a complex, sometimes sentimental man with few friends, who attended university, who speaks some Spanish and sometimes admires Mexicans, and who is a student of chess and classical music. He is a man who refuses a prospective client's fee for a job he considers unethical.The high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, he wrote, "The thing that rather gets me.