Raymond Chandler - Art? Or Escapism?

Those hard-boiled detective novels of Raymond Chandler are being revisited of late. The Telegraph asks whether they're escapism or art.

From the story...

When Raymond Chandler began to write for pulp magazines in the Thirties, he planned from the first to smuggle something like literature into them.

Most of these magazines hooked their readers with a mixture of sex and violence – “they have juxtaposed the steely automatic and the frilly panty and found that it pays off”, wrote S J Perelman. But Chandler wanted to do more than titillate: he had designs on his audience’s subconscious. He planned to sneak into his stories a quality which readers “would not shy off from, perhaps not even know was there … but which would somehow distil through their minds and leave an afterglow”.

When he embarked on full-length novels he was still essentially writing pulp stories with a subversive twist. His hero, Philip Marlowe, may have been as tough as any other Shamus, Dick or Peeper who appeared in Black Mask magazine, but he was also a sensitive soul, the kind of man who would knock out a thug with ease and then start musing about why the guy turned crooked and whether he had a wife and kids. And he was even known to refuse sex: “It’s great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time when you would rather cut your throat.”

Pulp purists may not quite have known what to make of him, but they had the intelligentsia to tell them. When Chandler died, 50 years ago this week, The New York Times noted that he had become the detective writer of choice for “highbrows”.

W H Auden wrote that his “powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”.



The Rumpus also puts a keen eye on Chandler.

From that particular story...

As a writer too, Chandler was a man out of place and out of time. His sensibilities were Edwardian and self-consciously English. As a young man in London his writing was sentimental, romantic and overdone. Much later he said that the poetry he wrote at the time was no better than ‘grade B Georgian,’ an admission that appears doubly harsh when one understands, as Chandler must have, that even ‘grade A’ Georgian poetry was considered old-fashioned and irrelevant by many critics in 1912.

This clash of epochs is part of Chandler’s appeal. In his books the tough, modern world of twentieth century Los Angeles is channeled through the much older worldview of Philip Marlowe, a detective who laments the upending of a romantic code of honour and courtly love. Chandler’s stories are full of references to Arthurian legend.