Raymond Chandler - a one-in-a-million writer

Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959) was an extraordinary writer. He wrote stories in the detective/crime genre but many critics regard him as a great literary craftsman. I had heard about his unique writing style even in my teens but never got a chance to read his books till recently. I have been reading his first six Philip Marlowe novels through the last few weeks and it has been quite a voyage of discovery.
Chandler's private eye is as different from Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot as possible. While Holmes and Poirot are quaint characters trapped in their respective time periods, Marlowe's world is much more closer to ours, in spite of the fact that stories about him are mostly set in the California/Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s.
What sets the Marlowe stories apart? To start with, there is the "diamond-hard" prose that Chandler perfected, along with the whiplash dialogue. Chandler is brilliant when it comes to descriptions and character development. I don't usually read books just for the language - for me the plot and storyline are as important as the language. But there is rarely a dull page in any of the Marlowe novels - the prose fairly crackles with imagination and terrific sentences.
A sample of Chandler's most memorable writing. They are so highly-regarded that fans describe them as "Chandlerisms":
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window." - Farewell, My Lovely
"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away." - The High Window
"His thin, claw-like hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock." - The Big Sleep
"Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." - Farewell, My Lovely .
And perhaps the most famous couple of sentences written by Chandler:
"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." - The Simple Art of Murder (essay)
Chandler's first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep (1939), changed the face of detective fiction for ever. It was such a stunning change from the tame and predictable writing the genre had seen till then. The most interesting thing was that few people could make sense of the convoluted plot! That was also a Chandler trademark - for instance, when I read The Little Sister (1949), I couldn't make head or tail of what was going on - characters kept appearing and disappearing, everyone seemed to be double-crossing everybody else and, by the end of it all, even when Marlowe seems to have sewn up the loose ends, I was left scratching my head to figure out the different plot strands and the many twists and turns.
It was said that even Chandler sometimes didn't know what was going on in his stories - there is the famous story about how the makers of the 1946 Hollywood version of The Big Sleep wondered what had really happened to one of the side-characters - so they wired Chandler, who replied that he also didn't have a clue! But the vibrancy of the prose is such that the reader keeps turning the pages even when he/she doesn't have much of an idea of what exactly what is happening around Marlowe.
Marlowe himself is an engaging protagonist - he's cynical, brave, hard-edged, a loner and always quick with a wisecrack and a quip. He is constantly lied to by lovely women and treated badly by corrupt cops and colourful villains. His world is a seedy one, full of sudden death and dark secrets - murders seem to happen around constantly. Marlowe is constantly in danger and physically assaulted any number of times.
How did such an amazing writer as Chandler turn out just about half-a-dozen books in a long life? He seemed to have arrived at the top of the heap without any development - The Big Sleep demonstrated that this was a writer who was already a finished product. He wrote that novel when he was over 50, after having written a number of "hard-boiled" short stories for American pulp magazines like Black Mask. Chandler was influenced heavily by the writing style of Dashiell Hammett - the latter's The Maltese Falcon and its hero, Sam Spade, was the template of Marlowe and his world. Sadly, Hammett is largely forgotten nowadays while Chandler's reputation has been growing year after year.
Interestingly, Chandler cannibalised many of his own early short stories for plots and situations for his latter-day Marlowe novels. Only at the very end of his writing career did Chandler seem to lose his way (hastened, no doubt, by a severe drinking problem and the death of his much-older wife) but his fans would claim any day that even Chandler's B-grade efforts were a lot better than the best writings of many of his competitors.
Chandler was also a top Hollywood script-writer in the 1940s and 1950s, though he had a difficult time in that profession. Much has been made out of his falling-out with the great Alfred Hitchcock during the making of the master's Strangers On a Train in 1951. Theirs were two big egos which were never going to coexist with each other in any way. Despite such setbacks, Chandler's scripts for noir films like Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia are still highly regarded.
Chandler was also a gifted essayist and letter-writer - his 1944 essay The Simple Art of Murder is one of the most famous of the 20th century - in it, he claimed that the American brand of hard-boiled detective fiction was far more realistic than the genteel world of British writers like Agatha Christie.
Chandler's influence on the detective/crime genre itself was enormous but it can also be argued that he was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, period. No writer has ever bested his style, though many have tried imitating him. Chandler was as distinctive as his best-known creation was.