A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (25 page)

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Black Mask Merry-Go-Round

T
he greatest single chronicler of L.A.’s gathering malaise, its sunlit moods of loss and hopelessness, had been here all along, or since 1912 anyway. I mean Raymond Chandler who, like Leslie White, switched careers at the height of the Depression. In Chandler’s case, the move was involuntary. He lost his high-paying job as an executive in the oil business, fired by Joseph Dabney in 1932.

Quite likely, Dabney was looking to cut loose employees and restructure his business at that point, and Chandler’s skirt-chasing and lost weekends provided an easy excuse. Chandler, drunk most of the time, was abusing the lawyers he had hired and Dabney paid for. An envious colleague, John Abrams, drove all the way from L.A. to Dabney’s cabin at Big Bear for the specific purpose of informing on Chandler. Abrams told this story with pride to Chandler biographer Frank MacShane. The plan worked: Chandler was tossed out on his ear and for a while thought about bringing suit against Abrams for slander. Instead, he gained revenge in a more delicious way, dishing insider dirt on Dabney’s operations to his old friend Warren Lloyd, who’d invited Chandler to L.A. in the first place. The Lloyd family was involved in a lawsuit with Dabney over disputed revenues from an oil field in Ventura. Chandler’s dope helped the Lloyds win their suit.

The whole episode has a nice heft to it, stopping short of violence but bristling with arrows of human malice and foible. The Lloyds thanked Chandler by giving him an allowance of $100 a month, money without which he and his wife Cissy would never have kept themselves afloat through the very tough coming years. By the end of 1932 Chandler had already changed his listing in the Los Angeles directory, giving his occupation, more than a little hopefully, as “writer.” Literary ambition had never left him, and he was determined, more than twenty years after the flop in London, to try again. Unlike Leslie White, however, he had no facile knack for story; and also unlike White, he was no longer young. He was forty-four, angry and despondent, an alcoholic, a self-destructive and divided man thrown on a new course.

“Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile, I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away,” Chandler later wrote. “This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was forceful and honest …” He decided this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid while he was learning. For Chandler, it proved a long and difficult process. His career, like Los Angeles itself, built slowly and took off with a series of rocket-like explosions. The early and the middle years of the 1930s entailed a torturous grind, but between 1939 and 1943 he would publish four novels: The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window; and The Lady in the Lake. And then Hollywood (“the golden graveyard” as he named it) came calling, in the dapper and impish form of director Billy Wilder, with whom he cowrote the classic script for Double Indemnity. Other screenplays followed, notably for The Blue Dahlia, and Chandler was at last flush again. His great success came, as producer John Houseman observed, when his creative days were almost over.

Before the fame and the money Chandler scraped a bare living, often earning less than $1,000 a year. It was a long slog through the 1930s, through the pages of the pulps and the years of the Depression. There were whole days when he and Cissy had nothing to eat but canned soup; they never starved but sometimes came close. He wrote twenty stories until The Big Sleep—twenty stories in seven years, a period during which Leslie White published a memoir, three novels, a couple of screenplays, and more than fifty first-person articles for the slicks, in addition to the pulp tales he sold almost monthly. White was a factory; Chandler, by the standards of the time, a trickle—but there was the matter of quality.

To make a beginning, Chandler read a novella by a star in the market: Erle Stanley Gardner, Leslie White’s friend. Chandler made a synopsis of the novella and wrote from that, then rewrote, and rewrote again. This first story, which Chandler called “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” took five months to complete. Joseph Shaw bought it for Black Mask in 1933 for a fee of $180—nowhere near enough to cover living expenses through the time of composition, but the first tiny miracle in Chandler’s writing life had occurred. He wasn’t prolific but he sold what he wrote thereafter, and Shaw knew that he’d found a different sort of talent. Much later, Chandler said that his early stories worked because they carried with them “a smell of fear”—his own fear of failure, fear of violence, fear of death. They were about “a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night.”

Something more than night: the phrase has become famous, suggesting an inner darkness that might exist during the brilliance of the day. All of Chandler’s early stories are cynical about motive and character, and all are set in the same place—a corrupted but still beautiful place, the bright and guilty place: Los Angeles. In “Spanish Blood,” which made the cover of Black Mask for November 1935, political boss Donegan Marr is found shot dead in his office. “A cigar had gone out in a tray with a bronze greyhound on its rim. His left hand dangled beside the chair and his right hand held a gun loosely on the desk top. The polished nails glittered in sunlight from the big closed window behind him.”

The bronze greyhound at the tray’s edge, the shiny fingernails of the corpse: these are the clinchers, exact details of the kind that Leslie White and a vast majority of pulp writers had no wish, or talent, to observe. “Spanish Blood” lays out its plot and backstory. “He was a lone wolf,” says one of the investigating cops to the other, talking about the gray-haired Donegan Marr. “In a few more years he’d have taken the town over.”

The cop notices an appointment book. Somebody called Imlay had been due in Marr’s office at twelve-fifteen. The second cop, the hero, Pete Delaguerra, looks at the cheap watch on his wrist and says, “One-thirty. Long gone. Who’s Imlay? … Say, wait a minute! There’s an assistant D.A. named Imlay. He’s running for judge …” A few pages later, Delaguerra talks to Donegan Marr’s widow, Belle. “This Imlay is running for judge with the backing of the Masters-Age group,” Delaguerra says. “It seems he’s been playing house with a nightclub number called Stella LaMotte. Somehow, someway, photos were taken of them together. Very drunk and undressed. Donny got the photos, Belle. They were found in his desk. According to his desk pad he had a date with Imlay at twelve-fifteen. We figure they had a row and Imlay beat him to the punch.”

In this early story Chandler recycles details of Charlie Crawford’s death at the hand of Dave Clark, an event that had snagged in the writer’s mind and surfaced again. Did Chandler suspect that work he’d done while with Joseph Dabney was part of the twisting chain of events that led to Crawford’s death? Perhaps. The connection was real, though several links back from the moment when Dave Clark’s newly bought Colt spat flame and caused death in the back office of 6665 Sunset Boulevard. What’s important is that Chandler was a part of all this, not merely an observer. The history of Los Angeles through the late 1920s and early 1930s sank into his blood and became a part of his writerly DNA because he’d been a minor player in that history. He’d felt its breath. Chance and the loss of his job forced him to turn to the pulps, but L.A. made him the only kind of writer he could have become. Chandler remembered and used one of Clark’s suggested motives, namely that someone had taken compromising photographs somewhere down the line. Chandler’s fiction abounds in blackmailers who get what’s coming to them (or don’t), in crooked D.A.s, violent cops, exhausted cops, disinterested cops, tough cops that can be greased but aren’t all bad, shyster lawyers, sinister racketeers, bent doctors, victim chauffeurs, seedy pornographers, gamblers too slick for their own good, and always the ruthless rich who do as they will and expect to buy their way out of whatever jam they land in. Philip Marlowe becomes a private eye after having been an investigator for the D.A.’s office, leaving when he realizes he can no longer live in that compromised world—like Leslie White.

Frequently Marlowe finds himself calling upon wealth. At the end of the 1930s Chandler began to plan full-length books. Like everything else in his career, this happened in an unusual way: he cannibalized his pulp stories, carving great chunks out of them, fusing and adding characters, picking out scenes, themes, sentences, paragraphs, and blending everything, amazingly, into his great early novels. At the beginning of the first of them, The Big Sleep, Marlowe is summoned to the Sternwood place, a vast pile with an enormous hothouse at the side, containing a steaming jungle of tropical plants like the famed collection the Dohenys maintained in their own enormous hothouse at Chester Place. The Sternwoods, too, have made their money in oil; and General Sternwood himself, with whom Marlowe has an interview, is an old man with Mexican connections and a sentimental fondness for the IRA. In the second novel, Farewell, My Lovely, Chandler has Marlowe visiting a big residence that resembles the other Doheny mansion, Greystone, making the joke that he owed to Leslie White about the place being smaller than Buckingham Palace and having fewer windows than the Chrysler Building. It’s here that Marlowe encounters the special kinds of light and silence that extreme wealth can buy. In the next book, The High Window, when confronted by a couple of jaded detectives, Marlowe asks if they remember “the Cassidy case.”

One of the cops sighs and, as if knowing what’s coming, says: “Murder and suicide during a drinking spree. The secretary went haywire and shot young Cassidy. I read it in the papers or something. Is that what you want me to say?”

Marlowe replies:

You read it in the papers, but it wasn’t so. What’s more you knew it wasn’t so and the D.A. knew it wasn’t so and the D.A.’s investigators were pulled off the case within a matter of hours. There was no inquest. But every crime reporter and every cop on every homicide detail knew it was Cassidy that did the shooting, that it was Cassidy that was crazy drunk, that it was the secretary who tried to handle him and couldn’t and at last tried to get away from him but wasn’t quick enough. Cassidy’s was a contact wound and the secretary’s was not. The secretary was left-handed and he had a cigarette in his left hand when he was shot. Even if you are right-handed, you don’t change a cigarette over to your other hand and shoot a man casually while holding the cigarette. They might do that on “Gang Busters,” but rich men’s secretaries don’t do it. And what were the family and the family doctor doing during the four hours they didn’t call the cops? Fixing it so there would only be a superficial investigation. And why were no tests made on the hands for nitrates? Because you didn’t want the truth. Cassidy was too big.

Raymond Chandler hated big money and the opportunities for negligence and the abuse of power that big money gives to those who possess it. “Young Cassidy” shot the secretary and then himself, Marlowe believed, just as Chandler believed that Ned Doheny shot Hugh Plunkett then himself, even though the Doheny family made sure that in the official version of the story Hugh Plunkett got the blame. In this, Chandler agreed with Leslie White—indeed, White was the source of his information.

On January 11, 1936, Chandler attended a get-together for Black Mask writers living on the West Coast. It was the only time he and Dashiell Hammett were ever in the same room. A photograph of the event was taken by Leslie White, who kept himself out of the shot this time, unlike that earlier occasion by what remained of the St. Francis Dam. But White met Chandler at least this once, and perhaps more often. Chandler read Me, Detective and drew on White’s account of the Doheny murder/suicide for the words he put in Marlowe’s mouth in The High Window. There’s nothing surprising here. As said, L.A.’s sensational crimes and history of graft were part of the raw material upon which Chandler drew as he imagined the city into life. He became a haunting poet of place—this place, L.A., whose split personality of light and dark mirrored his own. He caught the glaring sun, the glittering swimming pools, the cigar-stinking lobbies of seedy hotels, the improbable mansions, the dismal apartment buildings, the sound of tires on asphalt and gravel, the sparkling air of the city after rain and the smell of fog at the beach at night. The talk, lights, smells, people, streets, and buildings of L.A. cling to and issue from his fiction.

The 1938 story “Red Wind” begins with a famous description of what the city is like when the bad winds blow, when the eyes burn and the scalp screams, and the Pacific turns ominous and glassy, like a sheet of bronze. “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

What’s remarkable, though, is the way Chandler seizes this idea in “Red Wind” and runs with it, turning a pulp story into an extended prose poem through which the winds gust with an insane, constantly redoubled ferocity—scorching, swirling dust and torn paper. Chairs creak harshly. The tobacco in Marlowe’s cigarette is so dry that it burns like grass. “It was a small house, near a canyon rim out beyond Sawtelle, with a circle of writhing eucalyptus trees in front of it,” Marlowe notes, while across the street somebody is having delirium tremens in their front yard. “Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.” The observed details are brilliant and instantly recognizable; Chandler is writing about a city that seems to be in screaming agony.