To Make a Short Story Long – Part Two

The Pulp Roots

of Raymond Chandler's Early Novels

by Jim Doherty

In the last column, I talked a bit about how Dashiell Hammett used themes and plot devices from previously published short stories when he was developing his most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon (Knopf, 1930). Of course, this was not the only instance of Hammett's using previously published material in his novels. The portrayal of dysfunctional families in short stories like “Crooked Souls” ( Black Mask, 15 Oct. 1923, aka “The Gatewood Caper”) or “Night Shots” ( Black Mask , 1 Feb. 1924), for example, comes to full fruition in The Dain Curse (Knopf, 1929), the seeds for “Poisonville,” the corrupt rural town that is the setting for Red Harvest (Knopf, 1929), are plain to see in stories like “Nightmare Town” ( Argosy , 27 Dec. 1924) and “Corkscrew” ( Black Mask , Sep. 1925), and the corrupt municipal politics explored in stories like “Death on Pine Street” ( Black Mask , Sep. 1924, aka “Women, Politics, and Murder”) are more fully examined in The Glass Key (Knopf, 1930).

I also mentioned in the last issue that, when Hammett's successor, Raymond Chandler, took up the mantel of most revered writer of hard-boiled private eye fiction, he also made a point of recycling previously published short fiction for his book-length work. In fact, he's much better-known for it than Hammett ever was, probably because he was much more direct about it. Rather than taking themes, characters, and plot devices and reusing them in new ways, Chandler simply expanded his short stories to book-length.

This practice of taking a previously published short story and expanding it into a novel was certainly not unheard of in crime fiction by the time Chandler began writing. Earlier examples include R. Austin Freeman's The Mystery of 31 New Inn (Winston, 1913), which was expanded from a short story called “31, New Inn” published the previous year, and Marie Belloc Lowndes's fictionalization of the Jack the Ripper case, The Lodger (Scribner's, 1913), a full-length version of a short story that had appeared in McClure's in 1911.

Chandler took it one step further, however. Rather than simply expand a single short story into a book, he'd take two or three short stories, completely unrelated to each other (aside from their sharing the same lead character), and combine them into a single novel.

Since Chandler was striking out on new ground by attempting book-length fiction, it must have seemed logical to use material with which he was familiar. Taking a closer look at precisely how he did this provides an insight into the way he approached his craft.

Chandler 's iconic private eye hero, Philip Marlowe, went through several name changes in the course of his development. When he first appeared in the short story “Finger Man” ( Black Mask , Oct. 1934), he was, like Hammett's Op, an anonymous first person narrator. By his third appearance, in “The Man Who Liked Dogs” ( Black Mask, Mar. 1936), he'd acquired the name “Carmady.” Later, when Chandler shifted his flag to Black Mask 's top competitor, Dime Detective , he would change the name of the character to “John Dalmas,” this to satisfy Dime Detective 's editors, who had asked Chandler to create creating a completely new series character for the magazine. All he really did, though, was rename Carmady.

When Chandler moved to book-length fiction, he decided to rename the character again. With the publication of The Big Sleep (Knopf, 1939), Chandler's detective became Marlowe, and stayed with that name for the rest of his career (with the exception of one single short story in which he briefly became “John Evans”). Eventually, Chandler even retrofitted the name into his earlier short fiction, changing the character from “Carmady” or “Dalmas” to “Marlowe,” when some of those pulp stories were reprinted years later.

There was a significant amount of his early short fiction, however, that Chandler resisted having reprinted. The seven short stories that he used as the source material for The Big Sleep , Farewell, My Lovely (Knopf, 1940), and The Lady in the Lake (Knopf, 1943) were, with one exception that Chandler strongly objected to, never reprinted until after his death.

Chandler called the process of combining and expanding previously published short fiction “cannibalizing,” and he was apparently embarrassed enough by it that he was content to let those “cannibalized” stories slip into oblivion once the books he developed from them were in print.

How did Chandler choose the stories he “cannibalized” for his novels? One would naturally assume that Chandler chose pieces that he was particularly pleased with. On the other hand, he may just as easily have chosen pieces he thought weren't done right the first time and wanted to take another crack at, or pieces with plots he felt he hadn't done proper justice to in the compressed space of a short story. And it's even less clear exactly why Chandler chose one given combination of disparate short stories to expand to novel length rather than another.

In the case of The Big Sleep , he combined and expanded two Carmady stories from Black Mask , “Killer in the Rain” (Jan. 1935) and “The Curtain” (Sep. 1936).

In "Killer in the Rain," Carmady (still actually unnamed at this point, though he'd become “Carmady” in his next appearance) is hired by oil millionaire Tony Dravec to free his adopted daughter, Carmen, from the power of a shady blackmailer. The blackmailer turns out to be a pornographer who operates a rental library of high-class smut behind the facade of a rare books shop, but before the detective gets too far on the case the blackmailer is killed. Now he must solve the murder in order to keep his client out of trouble.

In "The Curtain," Carmady is hired by a wheelchair-bound retired general to find his missing son-in-law. The son-in-law had apparently grown weary of his marriage to the General's daughter and of being a surrogate father to the General's grandson, and had taken up with the wife of a local mobster. Since the mobster's wife is also missing, it appears as though the two might have simply run off together. But when Carmady traces the wife to an out-of-the-way mechanic's garage in nearby Realito, he finds that the truth behind the disappearance is very different.

In broad terms, as those of you familiar with the novel have undoubtedly already surmised, what Chandler did was to simply combine the blackmail investigation from “Killer in the Rain” with the missing persons investigation from “The Curtain.”

Redundant characters were jettisoned. Hence oilman Tony Dravec was eliminated and the actions he performed in “Killer in the Rain” were assigned to the General, whose role was appropriately expanded. Similarly, the grandson from “The Curtain” was excised, and the General was instead given a younger daughter—Carmen from “Killer in the Rain”—whose role was likewise expanded so that she performed both her own actions from “Killer in the Rain” and the grandson's from “The Curtain.”

In constructing the novel, Chandler simply lifted scenes, virtually intact, from one story or the other, and expanded those scenes into chapters for the book. Since the two stories have completely different, unrelated plotlines, Chandler also wrote new, wholly original chapters, fusing those separate plots into a cohesive entity.

As we mentioned, the novel form's greater length allowed Chandler to give full rein to his ability to set atmosphere through vivid description. To demonstrate, it might help to compare two paragraphs, one from “The Curtain” and the other from The Big Sleep , both describing the steamy greenhouse where the detective meets his client, the General.

In “The Curtain” the passage goes as follows:

The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the glass house dripped. In the half light enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.

Set free from the space constraints of the short story, the same passage in The Big Sleep goes:

The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

As Chandler scholar Philip Durham points out in his introduction to Killer in the Rain and Other Stories (Houghton Miflin, 1964) a posthumous collection of Chandler 's cannibalized stories, “Both passages are intense and vivid.” The paragraph from the short story, showing the influence of Hammett, “. . . achieves its effectiveness though terseness . . .,” while the passage from the novel “create[s] a mood through the use of hyperbole and striking simile.”

Chandler reworked and expanded passages from the short stories in the same manner throughout The Big Sleep . The method allowed him to take what he had learned from writing short stories, and apply it directly to the new medium of the novel. The finished product is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, in which the author was able to take familiar material and rework it in fresh new ways to make a wholly new product.

Chandler 's second novel, Farewell, My Lovely, also combined and expanded several short stories. Looking back on the book in 1949, Chandler said that he would probably never match Farewell, My Lovely “for plot complication.” His assessment of the book is quite accurate. It is perhaps his most densely plotted novel. And this is probably a reflection of the fact that it derived from three short stories, rather than only two like The Big Sleep . For Farewell My Lovely, he combined and expanded “The Man Who Liked Dogs,” “Try the Girl” ( Black Mask , Jan. 1937), and “Mandarin's Jade” ( Dime Detective, Nov. 1937).

“The Man Who Liked Dogs” opens with Carmady, looking for a missing heiress, following a lead to Southern California suburban town (modeled on Santa Monica; Chandler would eventually dub this fictionalized suburb “Bay City,” but in this story it is unnamed) and coming up against a brother/sister team of armed robbers reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde. He's forcibly checked into a mental hospital that actually operates as a sort of station in a criminal “underground railroad” that services fugitives from justice. And, like the gambling ship out on the bay, the hospital/hideout is apparently being operated with the approval of the local police.

“Try the Girl” starts out with Carmady crossing the path of a huge ex-con looking for the girl he left behind when he went off to serve his sentence. The ex-con has been looking for her at her old workplace, but it's changed hands since he's been in the slam, and now caters exclusively to black customers. When the frustrated suitor doesn't understand this, he gets violent and some people get killed.

In “Mandarin's Jade,” John Dalmas is hired to act as a bodyguard for a man who claims he's rendezvousing with some armed robbers in order to pay the ransom for some jewelry they stole several nights earlier. Dalmas reluctantly agrees to take the job, but it goes sour when his client is murdered. Dalmas is now determined to find the killer.

Chandler 's decision to combine those particular stories may have stemmed from the fact that they shared similar character types. For example, he may have regarded Steve Skalla, the gigantic ex-con searching for his lost love in “Try the Girl,” as being similar enough to “Moose” Magoon, the hulking armed robber from “Mandarin's Jade,” that they could be merged into a single character relatively easily, and that this composite character, the “Moose” Malloy of the novel, being a fugitive from the police, could then easily perform the actions that were assigned, in “The Man Who Liked Dogs,” to “Farmer” and Diana Saint, the Bonnie-and-Clyde-like bandits from that story.

Similarly, Vivian Baring, the radio performer with the unhappy past from “Try the Girl,” fused rather easily into Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast, the gold-digging adulterous wife with the unhappy past from “Mandarin's Jade,” to form Helen Grayle, the gold-digging former radio performer who married the boss and immediately started cheating on him.

However, this is all speculation.

Whatever the reason he chose those particular stories, his method was much the same as in The Big Sleep . He'd lift scenes from each of the various stories, blow them up into chapters for Farewell, My Lovely , then write new chapters that tied up the separate plot elements of the three stories into a cohesive unit. And, as with The Big Sleep , when he inserted a scene, he usually rewrote it extensively in an effort to improve, and usually to expand, on the original. Consider the description of Steve Skalla from the opening paragraphs of “Try the Girl”:

He wasn't just big. He was a giant. He looked seven feet high, and he wore loudest clothes I ever saw on a really big man.

Pleated maroon pants, a rough grayish coat with white billiard balls for buttons, brown suede shoes with explosions in white kid on them, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, a large red carnation, and a front-door handkerchief the color of the Irish flag. It was neatly arranged in three points, under the red carnation. On Central Avenue , not the quietest dressed street in the world, with that size and that make-up he looked about as unobtrusive as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

compared to “Moose” Malloy's description from the first chapter of Farewell, My Lovely :

He was a big man but not more than six feet five and not wider than a beer truck. He was about ten feet away from me. His arms hung loose at his sides and a forgotten cigar smoked behind his enormous fingers.

Slim, quiet negroes passed up and down the street and stared at him with darting side glances. He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn't really need them. 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.

Note that, in lengthening the description, Chandler doesn't simply add words; he draws a more complete picture. Hence, the gaudy handkerchief, for example, isn't just “neatly arranged” in the front breast pocket, as in the first version, but now vividly “cascades” from it. A red carnation on his jacket is replaced by “colored feathers” in his hatband, which we are assured, given the colorfulness of the rest of his ensemble, “he didn't really need.” Good words are replaced with better ones, so that “unobtrusive,” for example, becomes the more correctly descriptive “inconspicuous.” “He wore the loudest clothes I ever saw on a big man,” becomes the more laconic “He was worth looking at,” which, with its wry understatement, is far more effective. The addition of the single word “even” to the last sentence serves to heighten the contrast between the character and his surroundings.

Chandler would use the “cannibalization” process once more, for The Lady in the Lake , which derived from an identically titled short story from the Jan. 1939 issue of Dime Detective and “Bay City Blues” ( Dime Detective , June 1938). But, as I mentioned, he was never able to become entirely comfortable with this method of constructing a novel.

However he felt about it, however, it nevertheless became a model that subsequent mystery writers would follow in later years. Lawrence Block's Edgar-winning short story about New York City private investigator Matt Scudder, “By the Dawn's Early Light” ( Playboy , Aug. 1984), was expanded into the Scudder novel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (Arbor,1986), following the Chandler method. Another Edgar-winner, John Lutz's “Ride the Lightning” ( Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine , Jan. 1985), featuring St. Louis PI Alo Nudger, was expanded into an identically titled novel published by St. Martin 's in 1987. And perhaps no contemporary mystery writer has used the Chandler method of short story expansion more often than pulp fan and award-winning novelist Bill Pronzini, as in, for example, his San Francisco-set private eye novel Bleeders (Carroll & Graf, 2002), deriving from “Home Is the Place Where” ( Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine , Nov. 1995) and “The Big Bite” (from The Shamus Game , Signet, 2000, edited by Robert J. Randisi).

So it seems that Chandler 's methods, as much as his actual work, have become a template for mystery writers who came after.