The Chandler Site

I've Got a Rap Sheet . . . Contribution

2009-04-18T21:18:00.002-04:00

I recently contributed a piece on Raymond Chandler and gimlets for Jeff Pierce's blog The Rap Sheet.

Chandler Rights Changing Hands Again?

2009-04-14T22:38:00.002-04:00

According to Variety, Coolabi is supposedly making a takeover play for Chorion, the media rights company that owns the rights to Raymond Chandler's literary estate.

Judith Freeman on Dorothy Fisher, Chandler's Paramount Secretary

2009-04-08T21:52:00.000-04:00

Judith Freeman has a good piece in the L.A. Times about her meeting Dorothy Fisher, who (as Dorothy Gruber) was Chandler's secretary during his Paramount screenwriting years. It includes some good anecdotes about Chandler's behavior during these days.

In search of Chandler dust jackets . . .

2009-04-06T20:48:00.000-04:00

Anna Kelly, an editorial assistant at Penguin Books UK, has an interesting blog post about trying to track down first English edition dust jackets for five of Chandler's novels, which the firm is reissuing with replicas of the original jackets.

The initial plan called for releasing four of the novels in the throwback editions: The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The Little Sister, and The Long Good-bye. The Lady in the Lake was added later as it looked like they might not be able to turn up all four of the original picks, but once they did turn up all four (sort of) they decided to keep it in the run. Which means, of course, that The High Window and Playback are the ugly ducklings.

Thanks to Shane Mawe for the tip!

2009-04-02T09:39:00.000-04:00

Eagle-eyed Chandler fan Olivier Eyquem emailed me recently to say that he had spotted an apparent cameo appearance by Raymond Chandler in Double Indemnity, the movie he co-wrote with Billy Wilder for Paramount. I went back and watched the scene a couple of times (it appears about 16 minutes into the film), and I'm convinced it's Chandler, too. What do you think?

I've not read before about Chandler making any movie cameos, but seeing is believing. Olivier has posted about the scene over on his blog (which is in French). It looks like mystery writers John Billheimer and Mark Coggins spotted the appearance not too long ago, too, and there are some more frame captures on Coggin's blog Riordan's Desk.

A slight technical glitch . . .

2009-03-31T00:12:00.000-04:00

I recently purchased a new laptop after my old home PC died on me, and I just realized that I hadn't transferred over all my email accounts correctly and wasn't receiving emails sent to the "chandlersite" addressed.

I've corrected that problem now and should be receiving all the emails into my primary inbox going forward . . .

Oops!

New Chandler Scoop!

2009-03-29T16:56:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I got an email from Loren Latker that invited me to visit his web site Shamus Town: Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. I was in the middle of a rather hectic March, and the email languished in my inbox for much too long before I actually had time to go give the site a proper visit.

Wow! I shouldn't have been so slow. The site not only has hundreds of fantastic old photos of Los Angeles from Chandler's era but also publishes several new key pieces of information about Chandler's early biography. This is particularly exciting for me because I've not seen anything new information about Chandler's early life (pre-1938) in almost a decade. I won't spoil the surprise here, but checkout the timeline at Shamus Town and look for the "NEW" designation on the entries:

http://homepage.mac.com/llatker/timeline.html

This is some good stuff. Let's hope Mr. Latker finishes his current side project of repairing panoramic cameras so he can get back to digging on Chandler!

The Big Sleep Hotel

2008-11-16T18:45:00.000-05:00

Who knew? There's a three-hotel British chain called The Big Sleep. This reviewer claims it's named after the Chandler novel, but you wouldn't know it from the decor shown on the website.

Chandler 2.0

2008-11-08T21:21:00.000-05:00

For several years (from 1997 to 2003) I made a valiant effort at running The Raymond Chandler Web Site, an Internet website devoted to the works of Raymond Chandler. For many years, if you googled "Raymond Chandler" my site came up at the top of the list (which pleased me to no end the first time I discovered it); in recent times, the site has fallen to second, behind the Wikipedia entry for Chandler, but still pretty good, especially considering I haven't added any new content in five years.

My original concept for the site was that it would perform a function similar to that of scholarly newsletters in the 1960s and 1970s. These were cheaply produced things dedicated to particular authors or genres--usually typewritten and mimeographed and mailed out to a small list of subscribers, mostly academic specialists in the field. I figured I could update the form for the web, with new material coming out more frequently than the old quarterly newsletters, and including pictures--in general, making it more timely and more widely accessible and a better way for Chandler scholars and fans to share information about their favorite author. I would be the publisher/editor and would solicit contributions and people would submit entries--full-length articles, notes, and queries--about Raymond Chandler and before long we'd have a rollicking community going on.

It didn't quite turn out that way. What I envisioned as a lively exchange of material became pretty much a one-way feed. I posted bits of my Master's thesis and various articles I'd been working on and put up choice nuggets I found during my research for my Ph. D. dissertation, and in response I got mainly a lot of emails in the following three categories:

1. Desperate and often quite snippy emails from undergraduates asking me to provide the answers for their English 102 homework

2. Queries from people all over the globe trying to figure out who they could contact to obtain permissions to reprint Chandler's works (that contact, by the way, would be Margaret Phillips at Ed Victor Ltd, a London literary agency. Chorion acquired 75% of the Chandler estate in 2005, but I think Victor still is the main representative.)

3. Journalists looking to finish an article on Chandler without having to read anything Chandler wrote

I did get a few essays submitted by some talented students, and I happily posted them, but all in all I was sorely disappointed in how little input I received from scholars and researchers and mystery buffs--and this was the top ranking Chandler site on Google, not some page tucked away in a .edu domain where no one could find it.

Somewhere around 2000 I concluded that The Raymond Chandler Web Site was an experiment that failed. The site was there, I had populated it with what was (arguably) the most in-depth content on the web about Chandler (not that the content is all that deep, just deeper than anything else available out there), and invited the academic world to join the party and submit their contributions. And no one came to the party.

So, it wasn't going to be an academic newsletter type of community site. But, I was getting a lot of emails and commments from people who were clearly just Chandler fans--loved reading the novels and quoting the great lines but really had no interest in writing literary criticism about the books. So, I ran with an idea of Chandlerisms--I threw out a few of my favorite quotes from Chandler's novels and asked readers to submit theirs. And they did. Several a week, in fact, and I kept the Chandlerism feature going since it was the one thing that was drawing traffic.

But, after a year or so and after completing both a Ph.D. dissertation and a documentary biography of Chandler, I was a little burned out. I stopped making updates to the site and let it start to gather dust.

That was five years ago. A lot has changed since then. I've veered away from literary history and into the world of food writing. From blogs and wikis to Facebook and Twitter, the Internet has changed.

So, it seems like it's time to dust off the old Chandler Site, brush it up with a little DHTML and Web 2.0 razzle dazzle, and see what the old gal can do.

Leave some comments. Let me know what you think. I've got a filing cabinet full of material just waiting to be digitized!