Chandler Talked About Plot

[NOIRTRASH]

Raymond Chandler said GOOD PLOTS MAKE GOOD SCENES.

Senile Texans with big mouths and itty-bitty pee-pees hate Chandler. But his writing reputation is about as solid as George Patton's (for military command) or Stalin's (for evil).

LIT writers prefer Stream of Consciousness blabber to carefully crafted plots.

 

[lovecraft68]

Okay, I will finally Bite

I am going to pick up a Chandler book, which one do you think I'd like?

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Okay, I will finally Bite

I am going to pick up a Chandler book, which one do you think I'd like?

THE BIG SLEEP is the magnum cum loudly. Most people like it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Sleep

Critics rate it high.

 

[TxRad]

I didn't say I hated Chandler. I said I wasn't impressed.

And by the way, yes, I do have a large mouth and a large dick also. Only people of your mindset have pee pees or think small.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

I didn't say I hated Chandler. I said I wasn't impressed.

And by the way, yes, I do have a large mouth and a large dick also. Only people of your mindset have pee pees or think small.

But I gotta gut fulla Cinderella fat that becomes cock at midnight.

 

[R. Richard]

niortrash:
Your post is just a personal attack on another Literotican. You earned yourself a complaint, to Laurel

 

[sr71plt]

Nothing new for James--initiating a thread just to personally attack. But as is often the case he misses the point. It isn't a case of anyone not liking or appreciating Raymond Chandler or his style (in general) of writing--it's James' ad nauseam hammering away at Raymond Chandler as "the" example for writers here. Chandler is just one of thousands of good authors to appreciate and emulate when a distinctive style is being sought, but not necessarily one who is the best to emulate for erotica. At least not the only one to "worship" as James does ad nauseam in broken record forum posts by a neophyte writer who likes to personally attack others and craves attention.

 

[lovecraft68]

Nothing new for James--initiating a thread just to personally attack. But as is often the case he misses the point. It isn't a case of anyone not liking or appreciating Raymond Chandler or his style (in general) of writing--it's James' ad nauseam hammering away at Raymond Chandler as "the" example for writers here. Chandler is just one of thousands of good authors to appreciate and emulate when a distinctive style is being sought, but not necessarily one who is the best to emulate for erotica. At least not the only one to "worship" as James does ad nauseam in broken record forum posts by a neophyte writer who likes to personally attack others and craves attention.

James isn't much of an erotica writer so I figure he's talking writing in general, especially his beloved noir.

I think there's less out there in the paid market for people to go by in erotica at least in the sense of successful mainstream authors. Of course there's Lady Chatterley and Anne Rice's Beauty series and a few others, but not much.

As much as people claim 50 Shades impacted erotica I' have yet to hear anyone cite James as someone to emulate, which is a good thing.

I just started on my own and formed my own style with no influences for erotica. That's right, my wordy feminist slanted style is all mine.

 

[sr71plt]

I'm a fan of writers developing their own voice and style and not reading too many advice books from established writers. Read their work, yes (not just one or two) and pick up what you want to use, but do your own work and thinking and don't write by committee.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

niortrash:
Your post is just a personal attack on another Literotican. You earned yourself a complaint, to Laurel

Allah bless you

 

[sr71plt]

Allah bless you

And that's the truth. It's all about the attention for James.

 

[Serafina1210]

“The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story…was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to work in Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn’t make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.”

Chandler is saying that the main purpose of the plot is to generate good scenes: that is, the plot is subordinate to the scene. He's thinking in cinematic terms. His own writing bears this out. The plotting is often slapdash, as if he were feeling his way along instead of writing with a whole structure in mind. It's famous that in The Big Sleep, Chandler simply forgot to solve the murder of the chauffeur. He admitted it himself.

LC, The Big Sleep is definitely the thing to read. It's short, the scenes are brilliantly constructed (even if the plot is lame), and you get the essence of Chandler: racist, misogynist, homophobic, squicked by all things sexual, always sure that he's the only sane person in a world gone mad (and never once considering that he might be the madman in a basically rational world). And you get this essence without the long and tedious whiny screeds that increasingly characterized his work as he descended into self-pity and alcoholism.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

The chauffeur (Owen Taylor) killed himself.

Now, whether it was intentional, no one knows. Brody gave Taylor the head injury, but the car was going fast and straight when it got to the end of the pier. It wasn't pushed. The cops suspected suicide.

 

[Serafina1210]

The story is all over, but well told by William Ahearn (you can google it):

If you spend any time reading about how novels end up being movies, you will undoubtedly come across the story told about “The Big Sleep” and the confusion surrounding the death of the character Owen Taylor, the Sternwood family chauffeur. Who discovered the discrepancy seems to depend on who is telling the story. Whoever discovered the problem isn’t that important. What is important is that a telegram was sent to Raymond Chandler asking him “who killed the chauffeur?”

Chandler replied, “damned if I know.”

While many claim the story is apocryphal, Raymond Chandler refers to the telegram in a letter to Jamie Hamilton on March 21, 1949, that is published in The Raymond Chandler Papers by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane.

“I remember,” Chandler wrote to Hamilton, “several years ago when Howard Hawks was making [“The Big Sleep”], he and Bogart got into an argument as to whether one of the characters was murdered or committed suicide. They sent me a wire (there’s a joke about this too) asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either. Of course I got hooted at.” (Parentheses in original.)

Wikipedia also covers this:

The famously unanswered question in The Big Sleep is who killed the chauffeur. When Howard Hawks filmed the novel, his writing team was perplexed by that question, in response to which Chandler replied that he had no idea. This exemplifies a difference between Chandler's style of crime fiction and that of previous authors. To Chandler, plot was less important than atmosphere and characterization. An ending that answered every question while neatly tying every plot thread mattered less to Chandler than interesting characters with believable behavior.

This is not a criticism of Chandler, but rather a statement of his priorities. Plot wasn't all that important to him: characterization, atmosphere, the creation of a compelling scene, these were the things he cared most about.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

The story is all over, but well told by William Ahearn (you can google it):



Wikipedia also covers this:



This is not a criticism of Chandler, but rather a statement of his priorities. Plot wasn't all that important to him: characterization, atmosphere, the creation of a compelling scene, these were the things he cared most about.

Stephen King sez he was wasted when he wrote his early, popular books, and his big regret is no clue how he wrote them.

Chandler's THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER is his thinking about how to craft mysteries, and how mystery writer's fail.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

James isn't much of an erotica writer so I figure he's talking writing in general, especially his beloved noir.

I think there's less out there in the paid market for people to go by in erotica at least in the sense of successful mainstream authors. Of course there's Lady Chatterley and Anne Rice's Beauty series and a few others, but not much.

As much as people claim 50 Shades impacted erotica I' have yet to hear anyone cite James as someone to emulate, which is a good thing.

I just started on my own and formed my own style with no influences for erotica. That's right, my wordy feminist slanted style is all mine.

Yesterday I fell over a pile of erotic noir of the 30s. The writers are companions and acquaintances of Lovecraft when trashy pulps paid the bills.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

I did some thinking about the Owen Taylor death, and read Chandler's THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER. It's a useful essay about the philosophy of fiction writing and what things mean.

The essay says nothing about Owen Taylor but says plenty of fiction murders don't matter. Owen Taylor didn't matter, especially after he killed the porn store owner. He was literally caught between the devil (Carmen Sternwood) and the deep blue sea. And he chose the deep blue sea so his body would be found.

 

[Serafina1210]

I did some thinking about the Owen Taylor death, and read Chandler's THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER. It's a useful essay about the philosophy of fiction writing and what things mean.

The essay says nothing about Owen Taylor but says plenty of fiction murders don't matter. Owen Taylor didn't matter, especially after he killed the porn store owner. He was literally caught between the devil (Carmen Sternwood) and the deep blue sea. And he chose the deep blue sea so his body would be found.

For Chandler the important thing isn't how you died or even who killed you, but what you died for. Owen died for Carmen, who was worthless in Chandler's estimation (though I like her, being partial to nymphomaniacs), so he was pathetic and a fool. Rusty died nobly, rejecting Carmen just the way Marlowe did (Marlowe is always noble, no matter how big an asshole he's being), but ultimately it's not important who killed him. Carmen gets packed off to a cushy loony bin instead of the electric chair, and Rusty gets to decompose in his dirty sump.

 

[lovecraft68]

LC, The Big Sleep is definitely the thing to read. It's short, the scenes are brilliantly constructed (even if the plot is lame), and you get the essence of Chandler: racist, misogynist, homophobic, squicked by all things sexual, always sure that he's the only sane person in a world gone mad (and never once considering that he might be the madman in a basically rational world). And you get this essence without the long and tedious whiny screeds that increasingly characterized his work as he descended into self-pity and alcoholism.

So he writes like HP Lovecraft? Well minus the misogyny, I never caught that in his work, but the others in spades, also his fear of seafood and old age.

 

[Serafina1210]

So he writes like HP Lovecraft? Well minus the misogyny, I never caught that in his work, but the others in spades, also his fear of seafood and old age.

I hate to confess this to you of all people, LC, but I've never made it to the end of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Just not my thing. I don't think Marlowe was afraid of old age or seafood (!), and if I remember rightly Lovecraft's style has more kinship with, say, Poe than with Hemingway and Hammett, whom Chandler takes after.

I think you just have to pick up The Big Sleep to get Chandler. Can't get the essence of him from the movie. Fortunately, you can probably find a dog-eared copy for a buck or two in any used bookshop in Providence.

And once you've read the one, you've pretty much read them all. He did his one trick very well, but he was a one-trick pony.

 

[sr71plt]

And once you've read the one, you've pretty much read them all. He did his one trick very well, but he was a one-trick pony.

Ahh, that explains something then.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

I hate to confess this to you of all people, LC, but I've never made it to the end of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Just not my thing. I don't think Marlowe was afraid of old age or seafood (!), and if I remember rightly Lovecraft's style has more kinship with, say, Poe than with Hemingway and Hammett, whom Chandler takes after.

I think you just have to pick up The Big Sleep to get Chandler. Can't get the essence of him from the movie. Fortunately, you can probably find a dog-eared copy for a buck or two in any used bookshop in Providence.

And once you've read the one, you've pretty much read them all. He did his one trick very well, but he was a one-trick pony.

Marlowe is an icon like LeCarre's George Smiley or Don Westlake's Parker. Jim Rockford is/was the most popular tv private eye because Rockford is an icon. Readers love icons.

Youre right Chandler never strayed from the reservation, and was a champion of the formula. He wrote a ton of stuff but his best short stories became novellas then Philip Marlowe novels. There was a Philip Marlowe radio show with Van Heflin. Heflin talked like Chandler but not like Marlowe. Kevin Costner coulda been Marlowe. Marlowe is perfect and has no where to go, though I can argue he became James Bond. Ian Fleming alludes to it.

I confess H.P.Lovecraft is beyond my ken.

.

 

[SamScribble]

... but do your own work and thinking and don't write by committee.

Amen.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GlNwRgT-tg

 

[hermit1157]

Kevin Costner???? Costner would be a better Archie Goodwin. Or how about John MacDonald's hero, whose name escapes me. Aha, I remembered, Travis McGee!