Raymond Chandler Biographical Notes

Noir fiction master Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888 and spent much of his childhood living in his divorced mother’s native England. He moved to Los Angeles in 1913 — and remained forever identified with the city, thanks to his short stories and novels where Los Angeles plays a central role.

Chandler was 51 years old when his first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. He had spent many years as an executive in the oil business and, when he lost his job in the early 1930s (during the Depression, no less), decided to reinvent himself as a crime fiction writer.

After figuring out  the formula to the pulp detective stories, Chandler submitted his twist on the genre to the popular magazines of the day — most notably Black Mask, where his first published work appeared in 1933. Of this experience, he later wrote: “I spent five months on an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.”

During the 1940s, Chandler worked for a brief period as a Hollywood screenwriter — his most notable contribution as cowriter with Billy Wilder on the film noir masterwork Double Indemnity (1944), which earned the two men Academy Award nominations.

He spent his final years in La Jolla, California, just north of San Diego, and passed away in 1959.

BOTTOM LINE: Chandler turned something commonplace (pulp fiction) into something extraordinary — bringing style, originality, and unforgettable prose to crime sagas and turning them into high art.

Illustration by Scott Laumann, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (Used by permission). Visit Scott’s website here. I love Scott’s illustration because it sets Chandler in his free-ranging Southern California milieu, yet the formally attired writer remains detached, distanced — as if tilting his head to get a perspective on the bleached out, gritty place he called home for most of his life.

Review: The Kept Girl, novel by Kim Cooper

THE KEPT GIRL

Novel by Kim Cooper

 Silver Birch Press Review

*****Five stars *****

While Los Angeles has been called a city with a “history of forgetting”—with wide-scale demolition of landmarks and even entire neighborhoods—author Kim Cooper helps readers relive L.A.’s past in her captivating first novel, The Kept Girl (Esotouric, 2014), a book based on real people and events.

Cooper—a social historian, nonfiction author, and historic preservationist—serves as our guide as we travel back to Jazz Age L.A., the summer of 1929, just a few months before the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.

It was a time when L.A. was starting to boom, thanks to abundant oil reserves and the burgeoning movie business—with dreamers and people who preyed on dreamers converging on the City of Angels to reach for the gold ring.

One of these California transplants was Raymond Chandler, who moved to L.A. after his years of service during WWI—and by 1929, he had lived in the city for a decade. As a 41-year-old oil executive, his fondness for booze and broads complicated both his professional and private lives—since he made a living as an executive in the oil business and was married to an ailing woman nearly 20 years his senior.

Cooper’s novel reveals Chandler before he became L.A.’s premier chronicler of crime—the writer who more than anyone created the neon noir image of L.A. that the city has enjoyed ever since.

The Kept Girl—which takes place a decade before Chandler published his first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939—offers a speculative history of how the author may have got his start as a purveyor of crime fiction. In Cooper’s telling, Chandler’s employer asks him to investigate a religious cult that has squeezed $40,000 from Clifford Dabney, the boss’s nephew. Chandler enlists his secretary/mistress Muriel Fischer and an honest cop named Tom James—believed to be the model for detective Philip Marlowe—to assist him in solving the crime.

Throughout the story, the three protagonists deal with personal demons—including aging, sexism, alcoholism, and corruption—as they endeavor to crack the case of the Great Eleven Cult, headed by a shady mother and daughter who claim they receive messages and directives from angels.  A range of gullible types fall for their spiel—mainly out of greed, since the angels promise to reveal the locations of the richest oil deposits in California.

As P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and the L.A. of 1929 is much like a circus sideshow—with humanity in all its flaws, foibles, and hopes on full display. Cooper does a masterful job of pulling all the disparate parts of the story together into a riveting mystery. The big reveal at the end is worth the price of admission. So step right up and read The Kept Girl—you’ve never seen anything like it: history, social commentary, and an engaging mystery all in one tidy 274-page package.

The Kept Girl is available in Kindle and paperback versions at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim Cooper is the creator of 1947project, the crime-a-day time travel blog that spawned Esotouric’s popular crime bus tours, including Pasadena Confidential, the Real Black Dahlia and Weird West Adams. Her collaborative L.A. history blogs include On Bunker Hill and In SRO Land. With husband Richard Schave, Kim curates the Salons of LAVA–The Los Angeles Visionaries Association. When the third generation Angeleno isn’t combing old newspapers for forgotten scandals, she is a passionate advocate for historic preservation of signage,vernacular architecture and writer’s homes. Kim was for many years the editrix of Scram, a journal of unpopular culture. Her books include Fall in Love For Life, Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth, Lost in the Grooves and an oral history of the cult band Neutral Milk Hotel. The Kept Girl is her first novel.

COVER ART: Paul Rogers

Subscribe to THE KEPT GIRL, a noir novel by Kim Cooper

L.A. historian/author Kim Cooper, renowned for her Esotouric bus tours into “the secret heart of Los Angeles,” recently completed her noir novel THE KEPT GIRL – and is offering readers a terrific opportunity to subscribe to the book’s first printing (details at thekeptgirl.com).

The prestigious Kirkus Reviews recently featured THE KEPT GIRL in an article entitled “Eight Tales to Warm You Up for the New Year.” Mark your calendar for the launch party at Skylight books in Los Angeles on Thursday, 2/13/14.

The subscription offer — available through early January 2014 — features a variety of benefits, including the subscriber’s name prominently acknowledged in all copies of the book,  which will arrive enclosed in a limited-edition decorative slipcase. Book lovers, collectors, hardboiled fiction fans, don’t miss this chance to take part in a true publishing event. Considering all the benefits, this first-class publication is a tremendous bargain at just $65.

Before Raymond Chandler became LA’s crime laureate, he was an LA oil company executive. Inspired by this historic nugget, Kim Cooper, social historian and co-founder of Esotouric, spins Chandler’s early LA years, a sinister 1920s angel-worshipping cult, an LAPD cop and a heroine who is much more than a ‘kept girl’ into a deeply researched and compulsively readable crime novel.”

Denise Hamilton, author of DAMAGE CONTROL & editor of Edgar Award-winning anthology LOS ANGELES NOIR

ABOUT THIS PUBLISHING METHOD: The Subscription model of publishing flourished in England in the 17th Century. Instead of relying on a single regal (and often capricious) patron, authors and publishers cultivated a select group of literate, engaged readers and collectors whose support encouraged and enabled the publication of books that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to produce. Through Subscription-sponsored publication, important atlases, geographies, and histories saw the light, along with great literature, including Milton’s Paradise Lost.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Kim Cooper‘s The Kept Girl is inspired by a sensational real-life Los Angeles cult murder spree which exploded into the public consciousness when fraud charges were filed against the cult’s leaders in 1929. The victim was the nephew of oil company president Joseph Dabney, Raymond Chandler‘s boss. In the novel, Chandler, still several years away from publishing his first short story, is one of three amateur detectives who uncover the ghastly truth about the Great Eleven cult over one frenetic week. Informed by the author’s extensive research into the literary, spiritual, criminal and architectural history of Southern California, The Kept Girl is a terrifying noir love story, set against the backdrop of a glittering pre-crash metropolis. To learn more about the book, visit the author’s blog. Sign up for the newsletter to receive occasional updates. Read a sample chapter here.

Kim Cooper is the perfect Virgil to 1929 Los Angeles, a city that was both a paradise and an inferno. Her knowledge of the city that was is unparalleled, her imagination unnerving. The real-life characters and crimes that would give birth to the pulp fiction of the 1930s and the film noir of the 1940s can all be found here. Aficionados of noir Los Angeles will read The Kept Girl with fascination and with growing horror as the terrible crime at its core is revealed.” 

John Buntin, author of L.A. NOIR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim Cooper is the creator of 1947project, the crime-a-day time travel blog that spawned Esotouric’s popular crime bus tours, including Pasadena Confidential, the Real Black Dahlia and Weird West Adams. Her collaborative L.A. history blogs include On Bunker Hill and In SRO Land. With husband Richard Schave, Kim curates the Salons of LAVA–The Los Angeles Visionaries Association. When the third generation Angeleno isn’t combing old newspapers for forgotten scandals, she is a passionate advocate for historic preservation of signage,vernacular architecture and writer’s homes. Kim was for many years the editrix of Scram, a journal of unpopular culture. Her books include Fall in Love For Life, Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth, Lost in the Grooves and an oral history of the cult band Neutral Milk Hotel. The Kept Girl is her first novel.

COVER ART: Paul Rogers

The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly Call for Submissions of Love-Themed Crime Poems

Gerald So, editor, at THE 5-2: CRIME POETRY WEEKLY, is seeking submissions of love-themed crime poems to be published in February 2014 in honor of Valentine’s Day.

Guidelines: Find out how to enter here.

Deadline:  December 31, 2013

For inspiration, check out The 5-2′s poems from February 2013:

Nyla Alisia, “Enter the Sandman: 31S love affair”

Christine Aletti, “Sylvia Plath, Gaslight Left On”

Robert Cooperman, “Delicious Sins”

JD Debris, “The Girl in the American Apparel Ad”

Anne Graue, “The Death of the Nut Harvester”

Clarinda Harriss, “Sweet-talk Me on Valentine’s Day”

Anina Robb, “Affair”

Hal Sirowitz, “Through Pink-Tinged Glasses”

Hollywood Hills Noir, poem by Laurel Ann Bogen

HOLLYWOOD HILLS NOIR
by Laurel Ann Bogen

Aberration of weather studs
the sloe eyed city where change
gels in ripples after due process
I could go deeper
pry open the locked vault
below, combustible fossils bubble
in tar and petroleum beneath
Wilshire Blvd. — the jacaranda’s roots
divide the house
Los Angeles
erupts in violet blossoms
each spring the profusion
is uncontained by stucco

Nature needs tending, or course
every few years the plates shift
the photogenic councilman is arrested
and somebody takes a fall
That’s how I came here — by a calling
as surely as the devil herself
cloaked in the need to be seen
in filtered light
latticed with faultlines
and an underground whirlpool
as profligate as oil.

“Hollywood Hills Noir” appears in Laurel Ann Bogen‘s collection Washing a Language (Red Hen Press, 2004), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laurel Ann Bogen is the author of 10 books of poetry and short fiction, and from 1996 until 2002 was literary curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been an instructor of poetry and performance for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program since 1990 and received the Outstanding Instructor of the Year in Creative Writing in 2008. Selected “Best Female Poet/Performer” by the L.A. Weekly in their Best of L.A. issue, she is well-known for her lively readings and is a founding member of the acclaimed poetry performance troupe, Nearly Fatal Women. The recipient of the Curtis Zahn Poetry Prize from the Pacificus Foundtion and two awards from the Academy of American Poets, her work has appeared in over 100 literary magazines and anthologies.

Photo: “The Famed Hollywood Sign from Bronson Canyon” by Corey Miller, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Raymond Chandler: Biographical Notes

Noir fiction master Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888 and spent much of his childhood living in his divorced mother’s native England. He moved to Los Angeles in 1913 — and remained forever identified with the city, thanks to his short stories and novels where Los Angeles plays a central role.

Chandler was 51 years old when his first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. He had spent many years as an executive in the oil business and, when he lost his job in the early 1930s (during the Depression, no less), decided to reinvent himself as a crime fiction writer.

After figuring out  the formula to the pulp detective stories, Chandler submitted his twist on the genre to the popular magazines of the day — most notably Black Mask, where his first published work appeared in 1933. Of this experience, he later wrote: “I spent five months on an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.”

During the 1940s, Chandler worked for a brief period as a Hollywood screenwriter — his most notable contribution as cowriter with Billy Wilder on the film noir masterwork Double Indemnity (1944), which earned the two men Academy Award nominations.

He spent his final years in La Jolla, California, just north of San Diego, and passed away in 1959.

BOTTOM LINE: Chandler turned something commonplace (pulp fiction) into something extraordinary — bringing style, originality, and unforgettable prose to crime sagas and turning them into high art.

Illustration by Scott Laumann, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (Used by permission). Visit Scott’s website here. I love Scott’s illustration because it sets Chandler in his free-ranging Southern California milieu, yet the formally attired writer remains detached, distanced — as if tilting his head to get a perspective on the bleached out, gritty place he called home for most of his life.

Write fast, quote by Raymond Chandler

The faster I write, the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I am pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”

RAYMOND CHANDLER

Writing Advice from Raymond Chandler

WRITING ADVICE FROM RAYMOND CHANDLER:

• A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

• Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder… The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

• The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It [style] is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. It is the product of emotion and perception.

• The challenge is to write about real things magically.

• The more you reason the less you create.

• Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it.

• I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn’t have to be great writing, it doesn’t even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Photo: Raymond Chandler’s novels

The Night Before Christmas by Raymond Chandler as told to CJ Ciaramella

The Night Before Christmas

by Raymond Chandler as told to CJ Ciaramella

It was the night before Christmas, when I first saw the red man. I was settled in my chair in the midst of a long bourbon nap, hand still clutching a highball glass of the stuff, when I heard a clatter, like a body tumbling down a flight of stairs.

I sat up in the chair to see what was the matter. The room was dark, save for the glow of Christmas lights on the tiny tree by the window. At first I thought it was nothing but a dream, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but the outline of a heavyset man creeping slowly out of the fireplace and into the room.

Then I thought about my gat, but it was in my suit coat, which was hanging by the doorway with care.

I sized him up as he moved closer. He was about six-foot-even, dressed from head to toe in a heavy red suit, like some two-bit hustler. His face was hidden under a thick, white beard. Under the suit I could see he was a big man. His belly jiggled like a bowl of jelly as he crept through the apartment. He moved quiet for his size and age. He had a big bag slung over his shoulder. I pegged him for a professional cat burglar or something.

He was halfway to the Christmas tree by the window when he spied me sitting in the chair. We had a nice, quiet moment where we considered each other’s presence.

“Expected me to be in the bedroom, I’m guessing,” I said. “What’s in the bag, Mac?”

He turned his head and laid his finger aside his nose with an impish grin. I stood up slowly from the chair and put the glass on the table.

“Okay, funny guy,” I said. “Okay.”

I went for the coat. He was on me as quick as a flash, awful fast for a big man. The bag clocked me in the back of the head as I reached the coat. Lights popped behind my eyes, and stars and sugar-plums and other silly things danced in front of them.

When I could see straight again, the red man was hoisting me to my feet. He spoke not a word, but went straight to work, planting one of his big, gloved mitts in my stomach, which doubled me over, and another on my chin to straighten me out. Then he tossed me, casually as he probably tossed that bag around, across the room.

“Merry Christmas, shamus,” the red man said real jolly like, throwing me a wrapped package from his bag as I sprawled on the floor. “Have a swell night.”

“How about next time just mail a card,” I said, rubbing my jaw.

He ignored that, walked over to the table, drank my bourbon, and walked out my door, leaving it swinging open.

The package was addressed to me from “St. Nick.” The name meant nothing to me. Inside was a new hat and an emptiness that only gift boxes on dark, solitary nights possess.

I put the tag in my pocket, the hat on a hook, closed the door, and poured another couple fingers of bourbon into the glass. Sat in the chair and waited for dawn or sleep, whichever found me first.

###

CJ Ciaramella has written for the Washington Free Beacon, The Awl, The Daily Caller, the San Diego Union-Tribune, The Weekly Standard, the Oregon Daily Emerald, the Oregon Quarterly and the Oregon Commentator, among others.

Illustration: Sodahead

New Release: Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology

Silver Birch Press is excited to announce the December 2013 release of the NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology — a collection of erasure poems based on the writings of a range of noir authors, including James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Walter Mosley, Robert B. Parker, and Cornell Woolrich.

The 122-page anthology features the work of 46 writers from around the world:  Jeffrey C. Alfier / Beth Ayer / Jenni B. Baker / David Barker / Kathy Burkett / Candace Butler / Freda Butler / Kim Cooper / Subhankar Das / Andrea Dickens / Barbara Eknoian / Chris Forhan / Laura Hartenberger / Paul Hawkins / Deborah Herman / Sandra Herman / Mathias Jansson / Jax NTP / Rosemarie Keenan / Wm. Todd King/ Joseph Lisowski / Renee Mallett / Adrian Manning/ Karen Margolis / Catfish McDaris / Marcia Meara / james w. moore / Sarah Nichols / Winston Plowes / David S. Pointer / D.A. Pratt / David Rachels / Jonne Rhodes / Van Roberts / Daniel Romo / Tere Sievers / Gerald So / Sherry Steiner / Caitlin Stern / Scott Stoller / Thomas R. Thomas / Mary Umans / Melanie Villines / Mercedes Webb-Pullman / Richard Wink / Joanie Hieger Fritz Zosike

For fans of mystery, crime, and hardboiled fiction, as well as film noir, the Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology is an interesting, unique, and inexpensive holiday gift. The book is currently available for $11.40 from Amazon.com.

A special note of appreciation to you the anthology’s contributing editors: Jenni B. Baker, Catfish McDaris, james w. moore, and Gerald So. Thanks to you, a wide range of established authors contributed their work to the collection. Fedoras off to you!

Major thanks, too, to Guy Budziak for allowing Silver Birch Press to feature his woodcut of William Conrad — as seen in the 1946 film The Killers — on the cover of the collection. For more of Guy Budziak‘s work, please visit filmnoirwoodcuts.com.