Chandler: The writer in the Waterford Quaker

A Mysterious Something in the Light: Raymond Chandler, A Life

The crime writer Raymond Chandler’s mother, Florence Thornton, was born in Waterford in 1861. She fled there when her marriage in the United States disintegrated, arriving with her son, Ray in

1900. It was a strange sanctuary, as detailed in Tom Williams’s fascinating biography of Chandler, A Mysterious Something in the Light.

Florence’s father died when she was young. Her tyrannical mother, Anna, ruled the roost in his stead. She never forgave Florence for the shame she brought on the family; Chandler, who was born in Chicago in 1888, remembers her refusing to serve her divorced daughter wine on occasions.

The family were Quakers with a rich palette of religious and class prejudices. The housekeeper refused to hire Catholics. Ray absorbed some of the intolerance. He remembered playing cricket with a cousin and some friends in Ireland when one of the players, a Catholic, arrived to the game “in an elaborate chariot with grooms in livery”, but the boy was not asked to hang on for tea with the rest of the boys after the game.

“I grew up with terrible contempt for Catholics, and I have trouble with it even now,” Chandler admitted later in life.

“It was a very weird atmosphere to be brought up in — a sort of wealthy, Anglo-Irish Protestant family that was riddled with snobbery, with a very backward-looking attitude to the world,” says Williams. “They were Victorians in an Edwardian era — the last vestiges of an older world that was being eroded around him. The nastiness was complicated for him. It shaped his view of the world. It made him very judgemental of hypocrites.

“He saw his grandmother and uncle as being hypocritical in the way they treated Florence, for example. When Ernest, the uncle, had an affair, because it was presented in a certain way — that no one got divorced — “that was alright”.

“He disliked that snobbery that was misdirected. That background impacted his view of hypocrites. It is something that Marlowe (Chandler’s famous sleuth) later reacts against with great venom.”

Williams titles his opening chapter, ‘My Father was an Alcoholic’. As a child, Chandler used to watch helplessly as his father drunkenly beat his mother. The experience of a troubled, violent marriage and the social purgatory Chandler’s mother endured while raising Ray under his grandmother’s roof, threw Chandler and his mother together inextricably.

There was a Freudian element to their relationship — she was protective of her son, and, despite several opportunities, she never succumbed to the advances of male suitors in middle age; something of her devotion to him informed the romantic, idealised notion he had of women later in life. Chandler’s extended family moved en bloc from Ireland to London where he received his schooling, although Chandler returned four times to summer in Waterford. His time as a day boy at Dulwich College — the alma mater, incidentally, of several fiction writers, including PG Wodehouse, Graham Swift and Michael Ondaatje — was formative.

At the turn of the century before this, Dulwich College was a training ground for imperial servants. Patriotism was revered. The school’s motto was “To my country, right or wrong”, but it was the college’s obsession with chivalry and honour that rubbed off on Chandler most, and surfaced later in the philosophy of Marlowe. Williams notes that British public schools of the time were like the tilting yards of Arthurian legend. Chandler broke from his mother in 1912 when he immigrated to the United States, but re-united with her once he had settled in Los Angeles in 1913. He enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1917 and saw action in the trenches in 1918, although, it seems, he slightly embellished his war efforts in his letter writing to lady friends later in life. After the war, he fell in love with Cissy, his best friend’s stepmother. She was a beautiful, vivacious, redheaded bohemian and 18 years his senior. Chandler claimed to carry a naked photo of her in his pocket. They married in 1924, a year after Chandler’s mother — who was aghast at the union — died. One of his nicknames for Cissy was “Momma”. Williams cautions, however, against the simplistic notion that Cissy was replacing Florence. “The relationship was also a way of rejecting his mother. He tried to escape Florence several times — first when he tried to live on his own in Bloomsbury, London, but that didn’t quite work; then he moves to America and has a brief period of independence. Then Florence reappears and he has to look after her again. He goes to war, comes back and falls in love with Cissy. She was sexy. He was desirous of her. He found her very attractive, alluring. Even though he had very complicated views about sex, he certainly wanted to have a sexual relationship with her. This woman was an alternative to his mother.

“It’s interesting — the only time a mother appears in one of his books is Mrs Murdoch in High Window, and she’s repulsive. You have to wonder if there is an element of his own resentment towards his mother — the way he had to look after her in California, the way she inhibited his marriage — of those feelings leaking out in that book.”

Chandler made financial hay in the Roaring Twenties. An oil boom gripped Los Angeles. He worked his way up the corporate ladder as an auditor in an oil company. He tumbled off it, however, in 1931 when his erratic behaviour — fuelled by heavy drinking — and personality clashes, led to his dismissal.

“I am standoffish with strangers, a form of shyness which whiskey cured when I was still able to take it in the requisite quantities,” wrote Chandler in a letter late in life. “I am terribly blunt, having been raised in that English tradition which permits a gentleman to be almost infinitely rude if he keeps his voice down.” The collapse of his business career freed him to revive his literary career, having spent several years as a failed poet in his youth. His seven crime-fiction novels — and Oscar-nominated screenplays, including Double Indemnity — were infused with his paranoid view of LA’s corrupt business and political world. It was a city in which a detective could never win.

“On the one hand the city was a paradise, but a paradise with a dark heart,” says Williams. “The thing that Chandler and James Ellroy both get is the corruption at the heart of the city and the way that it affects people. It’s a bizarre place today. It was even more bizarre then. The idea of this place growing out of nothing, and attracting all these naïve Midwesterners: ‘come to paradise. Live in the sunshine where fruits will grow 10 times their size and you can live a laid-back lifestyle’ and then a large number got taken advantage of and never fulfilled the life they dreamed of.”

One of the joys of Williams’s incisive account is that it will send you scampering back to Chandler’s hard-boiled fiction.