Sarah Weinman on Benjamin Black, Chandler and other literary brands

Just a sidenote: this article by Sarah Weinman is already two years old, but it caught my attention only just now, when I noticed Weinman post it on her Facebook page. It's a very intriguing piece, you should check it out. Lots of stuff I didn't know and also lots of stuff that piques my interest and fascination.

For a Raymond Chandler completist

Raymond Chandler just had a birthday couple days back. Here's a book I ran into, looks like a must have for any Chandler completist. It's a Finnish school book for students of English language, published in 1986, with a pulp magazine story by Chandler up front! The texts are in original English, though they may have been slightly edited. There's also the table of contents, it seems like a nice collection of varied crime stories. I don't know who did the cover.

Michael Dirda on Chandler

Here's Dirda's review on a new biography of Raymond Chandler: "As this new biography by Tom Williams reminds us, the chronicler of Southern California corruption is in multiple ways a hyphenated man, constantly apart or between, neither this nor that, both charming and weird."

William Gibson on Chandler and Hammett

This quote from a recent interview was posted to the Rara-Avis e-mail list:

GIBSON
I was never much of a Raymond Chandler fan, either.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

GIBSON
When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic.

But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.

The whole interview here.

Obscure Chandler

Almost forgot that it's the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death. The Rap Sheet gives you a plethora of links (and here's the rundown of Marlowes on film on the very same blog). By the way, my choice for the best Marlowe novel is Farewell My Lovely.

Pulpetti, being busy as usual, gives only a mystery to all the bibliographers round the world: what is the origin of this booklet, published in Finland in the 1940's? It's a short novelization of Double Indemnity, the film scripted by Chandler and Billy Wilder from James M. Cain's novel. Was it published first in English and if it was, when and in what country, in the US or the UK? Or was it perhaps published in Sweden first? No author credits are given in the book. I don't think it's Finnish in origin, even though no translator is mentioned.

I talk about the book more here.

The first Chandler in Finnish

Was Raymond Chandler available for the Finnish audience in the late 1940's when the book of my previous post was published? Yes and no. I believe the first instance when he was put out in Finnish was this rather obscure 72-page book from 1945: an abridged novelization of the film he wrote with Billy Wilder from James M. Cain's novel, The Double Indemnity (in Finnish The Woman Without Conscience, which is a fitting title). Chandler is mentioned only when the credits of the film are given, and I don't know who's responsible for the text.

Nainen ilman omaatuntoa came out in a series of similar condensed novelizations of popular films of the era. The series was published by Lehtipaino and it came out during the years 1944-1948. Some of the books in the series are quite easily found, but for some reason the Chandler-Wilder-Cain book is scarce. As you can see, my copy is not in a very good shape, but it's the only one I've been able to find.

The first real Chandler translations came out in 1950, in the pulp magazine Seikkailujen Maailma. As for the first Hammett translation, it has to be The Maltese Falcon in 1955. At least I haven't found anything earlier. (I seem to remember now that a friend of mine found an abridged version of one of Hammett's short stories, but the details escape me at the moment.) (Love Kirjat put out a good translation of Cain's novel in the early eighties, under the title Nainen ilman omatuntoa.)