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Chapter one examines Chandler’s biography to question the established view of the author’s life and war experience. By employing a psychological sketch of Chandler’s experience during World War One, fresh new insights into his writing, war trauma, and characterization can be gleaned.

Chapter two discusses the version of Chandler’s experiences presented by his biographers, before conducting a new and original investigation into the accuracy of their survey. Chandler’s correspondence was used to formulate a narrative version of his World War One experience in France.

This essay analyzes William Faulkner’s 1949 collection of detective stories, Knight’s Gambit, as a dialogue with Raymond Chandler over gender, art, and commerce in mystery fiction. Faulkner wrote the first draft of the title story before going to work adapting Chandler’s The Big Sleep into a screenplay, and he expanded and revised it afterwards. Chandler’s self-serving 1944 historiography of the detective story, “The Simple Art of Murder,” privileged masculine, American, proletarian stories that appeared in pulp magazines over the English-country-house variety that made their mark in feminine, consumerist, slick-paper magazines. Although Faulkner repeats Chandler’s mapping of the literary field into masculine, serious art and feminine, silly mass culture in “Knight’s Gambit,” he ultimately deconstructs that binary, suggesting that all fiction (commercial or literary) is intimately enmeshed—for better and for worse—with the consumer marketplace. 

Chapter four explores how the symptoms of war trauma have been transferred onto Chandler’s protagonist Philip Marlowe. Marlowe’s character traits will be closely examined by considering certain notable features such as the detective’s origins, characterization, disillusionment and his chivalric code of honour. Like Chandler, it becomes possible to identify the small but distinctive aspects of Marlowe’s character that suggest that he was a psychologically damaged war veteran fighting new battles on a different front.

Chapter three considers the relationship between detective fiction and war fiction and the impact of one style upon the other to create a ‘war noir’. Taking examples from renowned World War One novels, it will demonstrate that the same disillusionment and despair prevalent in the work of the renowned Lost Generation is equally prevalent in Chandler’s novels. Reading his novels as a convergence of the war novel and crime fiction, one can reconsider Chandler’s work as a legitimate representation of society and the trauma of war.

The final chapter will consider how Chandler’s novels have created a lasting legacy in contemporary fiction. The Vietnam War and the revival of the “traditional” hard-boiled detective during the 1970s signalled a considerable change in the image of the detective and the crime genre in general. In the aftermath of Vietnam, renewed interest in Chandler’s novels, from writers like James Crumely, brought with it a revival of the character of the veteran detective, with contemporary writers taking Chandler and Marlowe as their models.

In addition to Marlowe, Chandler’s other veteran characters also unwittingly suffer post-traumatic symptoms, and chapter six is an exploration of the most significant of Chandler’s novels and the work that best represents his protagonist as a veteran, The Long Goodbye (1953). Examining Marlowe’s behaviour around, and attitude towards, the two veterans identified in the novel, Roger Wade and Terry Lennox, it is argued that Marlowe becomes part of a “band of brothers,” an intimate group of veterans in whose company the detective displays the undeniable evidence of his past experiences and trauma.

Chapter five reconsiders Chandler’s own war experience to show that Marlowe, like his creator, displayed symptoms of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Examining the novels for these manifestations, Marlowe’s symptoms appear to fall into the three separate symptom-related categorizations of PTSD. This chapter will also demonstrate how the game of chess becomes a metaphor for the city of Los Angeles that enables the troubled detective to locate himself within a structured and orderly environment. Marlowe reassess and reviews his own case-related actions and dealings by evaluating his movements on the chessboard.

This chapter challenges the idea that stock genres evoke stock emotions. In the case of crime fiction, the anticipated movement is from the uncertainty of an unsolved crime towards the certainty of resolution. In the case of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, however, Marlowe’s change of mood invites readers to notice that while they are immersed in the suspense of the text, and thus rushed along on the roller-coaster of end-orientation, they also process the characters’ feelings, which do not necessarily move in the same direction or at the same pace. The emotions displayed in The Big Sleep suggest that crime fiction has a far broader emotional range. The chapter draws on these reading affects to challenge the authority of the novel’s solution.

This chapter examines the character of the wartime home-front detective in Hollywood films during the 1940s and discusses the similarity of this detective to his counterpart in the assembly line. It analyzes the film adaptations of several crime novels including Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler's Murder My Sweet, and Cornell Woolrich's Black Angel.

This chapter argues that the relationship between the Hollywood novel and films about Hollywood underwent a reversal of sorts beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It begins by examining how Los Angeles film noir of the 1940s set the stage for mainstream films to take direct aim at Hollywood. By 1950, the release of In a Lonely Place and Sunset Boulevard demonstrated Hollywood’s capacity to befoul its own nest as a handful of screenwriters, directors, and stars responded directly and critically to the industry’s rusting machinery. If film adaptations of Hollywood novels in the 1920s and 1930s had largely defanged the novels’ treatment of the industry, studio films around this time developed their own bite, especially amid the gradual collapse of the studio system.

This chapter analyzes one of the most frequent critical assertions made about Walter Mosley, the idea that Easy Rawlins is an African American version of Raymond Chandler’s “hard-boiled” detective. It argues that Easy Rawlins breaks down some of the social and cultural assumptions codified in Chandler’s formulation of the genre and, as such, represents “the alternative Mosley provides to exclusionary, hard-boiled ideological discourses that bolster masculinist, bourgeois, white social order.” The chapter makes the case that Easy’s development from Devil in a Blue Dress through Cinnamon Kiss (2005) departs from the isolated and authoritarian nature of the conventional hard-boiled hero and instead “asserts the value of home, community, and collaboration ... [and] provides a site from which to consider a means through which the hard-boiled hero can sustain African American communities.”

This chapter focuses on American crime and detective fiction published after World War I. It first discusses pulp publishing and its role in the transformation of American crime writing, with particular reference to the Black Mask magazine and its early years. It then cites the works of writers such as Carroll John Daly as well as Dashiell Hammett's contribution to the creation of a distinctively American form of crime fiction. It also examines the protagonists featured in crime and detective fiction during the Depression era, along with the novels of Horace McCoy and James M. Cain. Finally, it analyzes Raymond Chandler's notion of “quality of redemption”.

This chapter explores Hawk’s experiences working with Humphrey Bogart, specifically on the film The Big Sleep. Hawks describes the successful chemistry that continued between Bacall and Bogart, and details how he worked with author Raymond Chandler to pull the film together. He also explores the risqué double-entendres used in the film and how the film censors allowed them to go to production.

Reapproaching more canonical Hollywood novels in the context of three-color Technicolor and the Production Code, this chapter argues that Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (both 1939) countered Technicolor treatments of Southern California in film, which had reified not only the industry’s sanitized façade but also boosterism’s whitewashed history. In opposition to the Technicolor Corporation’s persistent claims to realism, The Day of the Locust laments mass culture’s colonization of the senses, while The Big Sleep critiques the unreality of everyday life in a place built on a commodified past. West and Chandler depict a Hollywood landscape collapsing in on itself, becoming visually indistinguishable from a Technicolor film yet morally unrecognizable by the standards of the screen.