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Your Quotes for 23 July 2005 - Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born at Chicago on this day in 1888. After his alcoholic father abandoned the family, Chandler was raised and educated in England, spent some time after college studying language in France and Germany, and worked as a journalist for several years there before returning to the US. As a British subject, he joined the Canadian Army for World War I, was wounded, and transferred to the RAF. After the war he was a bookkeeper and auditor for an oil company in California, rising to vice president before being fired for drinking, a problem he fought all his life. After losing his job he turned to writing, and though his output was not great (seven novels, plus short stories and screenplays), his tales of hard-boiled Philip Marlowe were a huge success.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.

The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
     - All from Raymond Chandler, 1888 - 1959

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