Tom Williams

Raymond Chandler had a mixed heritage. He was born in Chicago, but spent most of his formative years (7 – 24) in Britain. He was brought up by an Irish mother, surrounded by Irish family, though they hardly slotted into neat Irish stereotypes being Protestant. Then he went to Public school where Britishness, for better or worse, was drummed into him daily.

In Europe, in 1905 and 1906, Chandler encountered plenty of Americans but later wrote that he felt he had no affinity with them. When he moved to the States in 1912 he dressed like a young aristocrat, complete with cane, sporting a public school accent that was tinged with a hint of American. So when he got off the boat, how did he feel to be back home? Did he feel American, or British, or neither? During World War I he fought for the Canadian army and then joined the RAF so it seems that Chandler took a while to decide himself.

Many years later, when he came to write his first short stories, he found that he adopted an American voice, learning the language of American English like it was foreign to him and it must be that his unique upbringing, with its medley of national influences, gave him particular insight into the power of language and it is this that made him such a great writer.

In 1951 Chandler had this to say about Christmas:

Well, Christmas with all its ancient horrors is on us again. The stores are full of fantastic junk…People with strained, agonized expressions are poring over pieces of distorted glass and pottery, and being waited on, if that’s the correct expression, by specifically recruited morons on temporary parole from mental institutions, some of who by determined effort can tell a teapot from a pickaxe. (Letter to Hamish Hamilton, December 21st 1951 from The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler edited by Frank Macshane)

At times Chandler could be a grumpy old man but, as usual, here he has accurately described the hell of Christmas in a sentence or two. All the excessive glitz and glamour was a big turn off Raymond and he would be much happier spending the 25th December with his beloved wife Cissy, fussing together over a meal they had lovingly prepared together. Food was a big part of their life together and they kept a lot of recipes, along with annotations, in the many kitchens they kept together over the years. Towards the end of his life, Chandler thought about publishing a collection of these recipes and it is a great shame that he never did.

In 1976 Weidenfeld and Nicholson published facsimiles of excerpts from Raymond Chandler’s notebooks. They make fascinating reading. In them he lists possible titles (‘The Corpse Came in Person’, ‘The Diary of a Loud Check Suit’) and practices similes like ‘As noiseless as a finger in a glove’ or ‘As rare as a fat postman’ , some of which, he notes, were suggested by his wife Cissy. He even sketches out a plan for his writing career.

On Thursday, in the Special Collections Reading Room of the Bodleian in Oxford, I got my hands on the original. It came in a dull grey box which, when you opened it, released the pungent smell of good leather. It is an astonishing to think that this fragrance has stuck to the leather for so long, that it is the same smell that Raymond and Cissy smelt in 1938 when Chandler first started to write in it. Getting my hands on this sort of thing…well thats part of the thrill of writing a biography.