THE MYSTERY OF INFLUENCE
Why Raymond Chandler persists while so many more respected writers are forgotten
by Pico Iyer

Influence is a curious thing, as the Everyman's Library release of the first complete collection of Chandler's short stories (and its simultaneous release of two omnibus editions of his novels) underlines. There is, after all, no anniversary to celebrate, no ostensible reason why Chandler should be brought before the public eye again (none of his seven novels has ever been out of print). Yet he seems as central to us today as the Nobel Prize-winning poet born in the same year as he was, who likewise commuted between the English and the American ways of seeing things to suggest a modern fracture, T. S. Eliot. Dreiser, Lewis, and Upton Sinclair are all more warmly received into the canon, yet none of them gave us a voice, a presence--a moral stance, really--as easy to recognize and as hard to forget as Raymond Chandler did.

Even fewer American writers of the past century gave us a location (in Chandler's case, Los Angeles) that casts such a mythic spell. L.A., in Chandler's fiction, is not only a femme fatale but a shorthand for illusion; Hollywood comes to seem an allegorical zone in which nobody is what he seems (not even the straight-talking detective), morality itself is in turnaround, and the self is undergoing its ninth rewrite, being worked on by other hands. Even those who have never heard of Marlowe recognize, almost instinctively, the setting in which we most often find him: the rain-washed streets, broken neon flickering above the empty hotel, the darkened room. Chandler's favored locales have become as familiar as the souls who inhabit them, the dangerous blondes circling around a loner who hides his soft heart behind quick quips and a hopeful bravado.

  thanks to wood s lot