The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

RAYMOND CHANDLER (1888-1959)

Raymond Chandler, the writer who proved that private-eye fiction can be high art, was born in Chicago but educated in England, where his mother moved after his father faded from the scene. He worked in the English civil service, wrote newspaper articles and poetry, and moved to California in 1912. With the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian army, fought in France, was injured, and returned to California. By 1919, he had become a vice president of an oil company. He didn't begin publishing hard-boiled private-eye short stories in the pulps until 1933-the year after the oil company fired him for drunkenness.

Chandler wrote slowly and struggled with plots. He disdained the puzzle-oriented detective story in the British tradition, referring to it as "an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues." In his landmark essay, «The Simple Art of Murder,» he stated his belief that it is better to "give characters their heads and let them make their own mystery."

In the same essay, Chandler articulated the grace that takes fiction to the level of art and moulds the raw stuff of an ordinary protagonist into a hero. "In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption," Chandler wrote. "It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything."

Chandler 's work gained the immense admiration of readers the world over. More significantly, his work is admired by other writers. It has been said that Chandler 's work has done more to influence American writers who followed him than did the oeuvre of an author like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was a darling of the literary and academic establishment. And his influence is not confined to those writing genre fiction.

The private eye in Chandler 's novels is Philip Marlowe, a self-declared romantic who thinks of himself, with a trace of self-contempt, as a sort of knight in a corrupt, decadent society where chivalry is an aberration. Chandler admired Dashiell Hammett's work, and Marlowe can be described as Sam Spade with morals and introspection added.

While «I'll Be Waiting» doesn't include Marlowe, it does display Chandler's genius in choosing the telling detail to establish mood and create a scene that lingers in the mind, and in using the genre for powerful social commentary. It also reveals his ambivalence toward his women characters and his tendency to leave things not quite resolved. In a sense, «I'll Be Waiting» is as much a love story as it is a crime tale.