Why are Raymond Chandler's plots so hard to follow?

He built three of them out of short stories he had already published. "The Big Sleep" came out of "Killer in the Rain" and "The Curtain", "Farewell, My Lovely" out of three earlier stories, and "The Lady in the Lake" out of three more. Splicing two cases together leaves two solutions in one book, and he chose to leave the seam where it was rather than sand it flat. The choice was deliberate. So was the compensation. He moved the continuity into the narrator, which is why these books reward a second reading more than a first, when you already know the case does not fully close and can watch what is carrying the weight instead.

What work does a Chandler simile do?

It stops the story and spends the pause on a judgment. That is the structural fact worth having, and it contradicts what the imitations assume, which is that the comparison is a flourish laid over prose that keeps moving underneath. Nothing moves during one. He is buying a ranking, a moral temperature, a class placement, and he pays in momentum, which is affordable once in a scene and ruinous three times. The other half of the mechanism is provenance. The image has to be drawn from what this narrator would know about, so it arrives sounding like perception rather than like an author's cleverness parked in a character's mouth.

How do you hold a reader when the case is not converging?

Give the reader a second thing to keep count of. In Chandler that thing is a running account of what everything costs, kept by a narrator who grades every room he walks into, so the feeling of progress comes from a verdict that keeps growing rather than from facts slotting into place. Then make the delays expensive. An errand that discovers nothing can still leave a favour owed or a lie on the record, and that reads as forward motion. Peter Brooks describes the middle of any narrative as its dilatory space and names the real danger a short circuit, an ending arrived at too soon. Chandler was in no danger of that.

Is the Los Angeles of the novels a projection of Marlowe's mood?

No, and the distinction is the useful part. Surroundings that agree with the protagonist tell a reader nothing the protagonist has not already said, and Charles Baxter has a name for the habit, the fallacy of the objective correlative. Chandler's city runs its own errands, and it does so hardest where the money came from. You can see the old oil field from the windows of the Sternwood house, the sumps that paid for the orchids, working away below the lawn and indifferent to whoever is standing at the glass. At the end of the book Marlowe is down there among them. Copy that indifference and your pages get colder in the useful direction.

What did Chandler object to in the classic puzzle mystery?

He put the complaint in print in 1944, in an essay called "The Simple Art of Murder". The charge was that the English detective novel had turned killing into a diagram, solvable and weightless, with people arranged to suit the puzzle rather than the other way round. He was arguing against a school, and he was unfair to its best work. A reader arriving here from Doyle should hold both things at once, because the fair-play contract is a genuine achievement and Chandler wanted something the contract had no way of delivering, which was consequence. He took out the diagram. He put in a bill.

Where should a writer start with Chandler, without the costume?

Start with the order of a sentence. Report the physical thing first, then let the last clause grade it, and keep doing that until the shape comes without thinking. The trench coat and the office bottle are not the technique. After the sentence, take on the two structural habits, the errand that raises a price and the setting that declines to agree with the narrator, both of which transfer to any genre at all without a single fedora. The wisecrack comes last, once there is enough underneath it to be worth concealing. A joke with no judgment behind it is a joke, and his are load-bearing.

Fiction

Raymond ChandlerWriting Style

Born 7/23/1888 – Died 3/26/1959

Weld two plots that half fit, then over-invest in whoever is telling them, and readers stop needing the case to close.

Write like Raymond Chandler

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Raymond Chandler: voice, themes, and technique.

Three of the seven novels were welded out of stories Chandler had already sold to the pulps. "The Big Sleep" takes its two halves from "Killer in the Rain" and "The Curtain". "Farewell, My Lovely" absorbed three earlier stories, and "The Lady in the Lake" another three. Two cases spliced into one book do not arrive at the same answer, and he made no attempt to force them. What he built in place of a solution was a narrator who rates whatever he looks at, out loud and without pause, so that the reader's sense of getting somewhere comes from an accumulating verdict on a city rather than from a chain of cause closing on a name.

A stained-glass panel sits over the door of the Sternwood house. It shows a knight in armour working at the ropes of a woman tied to a tree, and Marlowe stands there long enough to decide that the knight is getting nowhere and that somebody would have to climb up and help. The moral position of the entire novel is in that observation, and the observation is a joke about a window. Late in the same book he sits at home over a chess problem, and the piece he lifts is a knight. Nothing in the scene points back to the hall. It does not have to.

A detective can be reported from the outside with no interior comment at all, which Hammett had already proved and keeps to for the whole length of "The Maltese Falcon". Chandler went the other way. His 1944 essay "The Simple Art of Murder" attacked the English puzzle novel for laying murder out as a diagram, and the trade he proposed in its place was expensive. He gave up the closing chain. He kept the reader by having every room, coat and lie in the book get scored on the way past.

The bill arrives for the reader who wants the case to add up. Watch what he does about that in "The Long Goodbye", where the Lennox business appears to close early and the book then moves into a different household entirely, a drunk novelist and his wife out in Idle Valley, and stays there while the first case waits. That is the shape to study. The delay is the book.

How to Write Like Raymond Chandler

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Raymond Chandler.

1
Run an appraisal pass over one finished scene
Take a scene that already stands and read it once with a single question, which is what the narrator has left ungraded. Every object, every face, every price should leave the pass carrying an assessment, and the assessment belongs at the end of the sentence rather than the front. Do not add adjectives. Add clauses instead. An adjective decorates the noun, while a trailing clause commits the narrator to a position he can turn out to be wrong about. You will find the scene has been reporting for pages without being liable for anything.
2
Move the verdict into the joke and cut the sentence that stated it
Find the place where your narrator explains what he thinks of someone. Write the wisecrack that would let him imply it, put the wisecrack in, delete the explanation. Then read the scene aloud to a person who has not seen the draft and ask them what the narrator thinks of that character. If they can tell you, the joke held. If they cannot, the joke was decoration and the deleted sentence had been carrying the load on its own. This is the hardest of the five, because the urge to make sure the reader got it survives a great many drafts.
3
Let the weather have business of its own
Pick out the most atmospheric paragraph in the draft and check whether the surroundings are agreeing with your protagonist. They usually are. Change one element so the place is either indifferent to him or busy with something of its own, a wind that started blowing before the body turned up, water that stays cold and clean while the town below it rots, a neighbour mowing a lawn. The scene gets colder and better. Surroundings that only reflect the man inside them have nothing left to report, and a reader learns fast to skim description that carries no information.
4
Add an errand that finds nothing and raises a price
Write a chapter in which the investigation, or whatever your story has instead of one, gets nowhere. The errand has to end with something more expensive than it started: a favour now owed, a lie now on the record, a person who now knows your protagonist exists. Then cut every other detour that fails the same test. Chandler's books survive their wandering because the wandering raises the bill, and a reader tracking a rising bill has stopped needing the case to close on time. Try it first on the weakest chapter you have.
5
Flatten the voice where the pressure is highest
Go to the loudest passage in the draft, the fight or the death or the confession, and take the heat out of the prose. Short declaratives, plain verbs, exact physical detail, no words that shout. Then hand the quietest passage in the book the one long sentence you have been saving. Baxter's word for prose that shouts everywhere is over-inflection, and he finds it in the hardboiled line, where the first thing lost is any sense of what should be emphasised and where. One loud thing per chapter is about the rate.

Raymond Chandler's Writing Style

Breakdown of Raymond Chandler's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

The working sentence has two parts, and the second one grades the first. Chandler's working sentence puts a plain physical report in front and hangs the appraisal off the end, where it lands last and stays there. He reports a room, a suit, a handshake, then adds four or five words that tell you what to make of the man who owns it. The order matters more than the wording. Reverse it and you have an opinion with an illustration attached, which reads as an author leaning into the frame. Set the openings of "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The High Window" beside each other and the same machine is audible in both, an entrance described flatly and item by item, then one clause that files the person under a heading. Fragments turn up, carrying attitude rather than experiment. A three-word sentence in his hands is a verdict that has stopped arguing.

Vocabulary Complexity

Count the abstract nouns on a page and you come up with a handful. The rest is glass, brass, smoke, silk, whiskey, linoleum, money. Chandler names materials and prices, and he knows the trade words, gun and car and legal and medical, which is where the narrator's competence sits. Then a single abstract word arrives and does the work of a paragraph. His moral vocabulary is small and old: cheap, decent, tired, clean. A room called cheap has been sentenced. Slang appears as proof of where a speaker comes from, and Marlowe's register shifts to meet whoever he is handling, up for the Sternwoods and down for a hotel clerk in Bay City.

Tone

The joke is the statement, and the judgment sits underneath it. Charles Baxter's formulation fits exactly: the official feeling goes into what is said, and the unofficial one goes into how it is pitched. Marlowe's wisecracks carry a moral reading he declines to state, and a reader assembles it out of tone alone, which is why the sincere lines land so hard when he finally allows himself one. Fitzgerald gave Nick Carraway a comparable job, an observer admitted to money on sufferance who rates it while claiming to suspend judgment, and the two narrators are close enough to be worth reading in the same week. What Chandler adds is fatigue. Marlowe announces his own tolerance about a page before he runs out of it, and the residue that collects over seven novels is tiredness rather than contempt.

Pacing

Pace here is a question of how long resolution can be held off before a reader leaves. His instrument for holding it off is the errand that yields nothing. Marlowe drives, waits outside a building, reads a name off a directory, has a drink he did not want, and the case sits exactly where it sat. Meanwhile the chapters keep breaking on an imbalance rather than on an answer, because somebody has gained ground or something has been paid for. The scale of the delay in "The Long Goodbye" is worth measuring: an entire second household, its own marriage and its own suicide, parked between a case and its reopening. Nothing about that is padding. Every hour Marlowe spends in Idle Valley makes the eventual return to Terry Lennox cost more.

Dialogue Style

Ask a Chandler character something direct and you get the answer to a different question. The evasions are sorted by class. Eddie Mars stays smooth, Carmen Sternwood giggles, and Norris the butler withholds an opinion in a manner that amounts to one. Marlowe's own lines run a shade too courteous for the situation, which is how he applies pressure without laying a hand on anyone. Then Anne Riordan turns up in "Farewell, My Lovely" and tells him things, accurately and for free, and the scene tilts, because the evasion machinery has nothing to grip and Marlowe is left with no move except to leave. That one character calibrates the rest of the cast. Her scenes are where you can read off what the politeness of the others is costing them.

Descriptive Approach

He describes little, and what he does describe is chosen for what it gives away about money. The larger habit is that the surroundings decline to agree with the man walking through them. A tired narrator in a borrowed noir gets a tired street, a sinister house, weather that nods along, and the setting stops telling a reader anything the narrator has not said already. The story "Red Wind" opens on the Santa Ana coming down through the passes, hot and dry, and the wind is there before anybody is dead and stays after. In "The Lady in the Lake" the mountain water at Little Fawn Lake is clean, cold and uninterested, while the rot is down the hill in Bay City doing its paperwork. Neither place is a mood. Both give Marlowe something to be measured against.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Raymond Chandler uses across their work.

The Spliced Case

Two published stories, one novel, no attempt to reconcile the middles. A welded plot has two centres of gravity, so the book cannot be held together by causation and has to be held together by the person narrating it, which is the constraint that produced the voice. It also produced the famous incoherence. That was the price, and he paid it knowingly. Writers can take the same route on purpose: build out of material that half fits, then over-invest in whoever is telling it.

The Misstated Commission

The client describes the wrong job. General Sternwood hires Marlowe over some gambling debts and blackmail while the thing he wants to know about is the son-in-law who left, and Mrs Murdock in "The High Window" hires him over a coin. Because the stated commission is false, the investigation has to wander in order to reach the real one, and the wandering stops looking like structural weakness. It is the licence for every detour that follows. The difficulty is that the lie has to be plausible enough to run on for a hundred pages and specific enough that its collapse is a scene.

The Errand That Raises the Bill

Chapters in which nothing is discovered and something becomes more expensive. There is one in "The Little Sister" that consists of driving across the city at night and rating it district by district, with no bearing on the case whatsoever, and it is among the best things he wrote. The plot stalls on purpose while the cost of the next refusal climbs, so a reader registers progress with no fact added to the investigation. This is the tool that makes loose plotting survivable. It fails the moment an errand only introduces another name.

The Object Filed for Later

An object is planted early, then comes back re-priced. The Brasher Doubloon passes through several hands in "The High Window" and means something different in each pair of them, so a reader keeps track of the coin and learns the people from what they will do to hold it. The tool solves a real problem in a story with no reliable chain of clues, which is how to give the reader something concrete to hold while the answers stay out of reach. Restraint is the hard part. Two circulating objects in a book is plenty.

The Unpaid Job

He works for a stated daily rate and then undercuts it. Marlowe finishes jobs no client asked him to finish, returns retainers, and takes beatings that no fee covers, and the economic fact is what gives his judgments any weight at all. A narrator who rates the world for free has to be shown paying for the privilege somewhere, or the ratings read as an author's opinions in a coat. The mechanism is simple to state and hard to place. The loss has to be visible and uncommented, in the same paragraph as something else.

The Narrator Allowed to Be Wrong

Marlowe's appraisals are delivered as fact, and some of them are wrong. He misreads Eileen Wade for most of "The Long Goodbye" and misreads his own friendship with Terry Lennox from the first page, and the book lets both errors stand without a correcting voice anywhere above him. That is what keeps a rating from turning into an authorial pronouncement, and it is the piece Highsmith pushes furthest, keeping a reader inside a killer's judgment with nothing to appeal to. The difficulty is the absence of signals. You have to let a narrator be confidently wrong on the page and trust a reader to catch it later, which costs nerve rather than technique.

Literary Devices Raymond Chandler Uses

Literary devices that define Raymond Chandler's style.

The Simile That Stops the Clock

A Chandler comparison halts narrated time for a beat and spends the beat on a ranking. Nothing moves while it runs. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why treating his similes as a joke collection misses what they cost him: he pays momentum in order to buy a moral position the narrator will not argue for out loud. The image also has to come out of this narrator's own social knowledge, money and boredom and cheap glamour, or the sentence sounds like the author reaching over a character's shoulder. Placement follows from that. The comparison goes where an explanation would otherwise have gone.

The Drop from Lyric to Flat

He lifts a sentence almost into lyric and sets the next one down flat, bored, procedural. The drop gets a laugh, and the laugh works as a valve, because it lets him point at beauty or at grief and get out before the paragraph turns sentimental. It also keeps the world unstable, which suits a book where the moral ground shifts under the narrator every few chapters. The device fails when both halves are pitched the same. Without a real lyric attempt the flat sentence has nothing to knock over, and imitations tend to write two flat sentences and call the second one a punchline.

Wardrobe Synecdoche

A person enters as an item of clothing, inventoried ahead of the face. Moose Malloy arrives in "Farewell, My Lovely" as a suit, and the suit gets itemised while the man inside it waits. The part standing in for the whole saves a paragraph of biography, which is the ordinary use of the figure. Chandler gives it a second job. The item he picks has to carry class, so the reader takes delivery of a social placement along with a picture, and the narrator demonstrates expertise without one sentence of self-description, which is how he earns the right to the judgments he makes later. Choose what a tailor would notice.

Flat Report Under Load

The prose gets quieter as the situation gets worse. Concussion, arrest and death are narrated in the register he keeps for a hallway, which produces a narrator who has been here before and expects to be here again. Baxter's note on uninflected telling is that it suits trauma, and that its risk is posture, flatness worn until it sets into a style. Chandler stays clear of that by letting the flatness break. Rarely, and at a price. Keep the breaks countable and a reader will trust the voice most on the pages where it says least.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Raymond Chandler.

Turning the volume up on every line

Hardboiled pastiche fails first on emphasis. The imitator writes each sentence as though it were the best one in the chapter, and out comes what Baxter calls over-inflection, prose gone purple from constant hyper-emphasis. When every line shouts, a reader loses the ability to hear which one matters. Chandler's pages are mostly flat. Go and count them. Plain reporting is what lets a single image detonate, and an imitation that strips out the plainness has removed the one thing that made the images work.

Treating the tangled plot as a licence

The books have a reputation for being hard to follow, and that reputation gets read as permission to let a plot drift. The permission does not transfer. Chandler's tangle was a by-product of splicing published stories together, and it holds up because the digressions are doing separate work, raising the price of the next decision even when they add nothing to the case at all. A detour written on purpose has to pass a harder test than one that arrived by accident. Ask what got more expensive. If nothing did, the chapter is a stall in a raincoat.

Making the city agree with the detective

The sad man walks down the sad street in the sad rain. This is the commonest failure in the whole imitation, and the writer committing it cannot see it, because surroundings that echo the protagonist feel atmospheric from the inside. What it costs is information. A reader works out soon enough that description in this book has stopped bringing news, and skips it from then on, which closes the channel Chandler moved the most through. Give the weather an errand.

Stripping out the decency so the voice can stay hard

Marlowe is sentimental, and imitators cut that first. They read the toughness as the substance and take out the code, the tiredness and the unpaid work he keeps doing for people who cannot cover it, and what is left is a voice with a great deal of attitude and no exposure whatsoever. Attitude without exposure reads as posture inside two pages. The judgments stop weighing anything, because a narrator who risks nothing has nothing riding on being right. Chandler makes Marlowe turn down money, and it costs him.

Books

Explore Raymond Chandler's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

The Big Sleep
The Big Sleep

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Raymond Chandler's writing style and techniques.

Why are Raymond Chandler's plots so hard to follow?: He built three of them out of short stories he had already published. "The Big Sleep" came out of "Killer in the Rain" and "The Curtain", "Farewell, My Lovely" out of three earlier stories, and "The Lady in the Lake" out of three more. Splicing two cases together leaves two solutions in one book, and he chose to leave the seam where it was rather than sand it flat. The choice was deliberate. So was the compensation. He moved the continuity into the narrator, which is why these books reward a second reading more than a first, when you already know the case does not fully close and can watch what is carrying the weight instead.
What work does a Chandler simile do?: It stops the story and spends the pause on a judgment. That is the structural fact worth having, and it contradicts what the imitations assume, which is that the comparison is a flourish laid over prose that keeps moving underneath. Nothing moves during one. He is buying a ranking, a moral temperature, a class placement, and he pays in momentum, which is affordable once in a scene and ruinous three times. The other half of the mechanism is provenance. The image has to be drawn from what this narrator would know about, so it arrives sounding like perception rather than like an author's cleverness parked in a character's mouth.
How do you hold a reader when the case is not converging?: Give the reader a second thing to keep count of. In Chandler that thing is a running account of what everything costs, kept by a narrator who grades every room he walks into, so the feeling of progress comes from a verdict that keeps growing rather than from facts slotting into place. Then make the delays expensive. An errand that discovers nothing can still leave a favour owed or a lie on the record, and that reads as forward motion. Peter Brooks describes the middle of any narrative as its dilatory space and names the real danger a short circuit, an ending arrived at too soon. Chandler was in no danger of that.
Is the Los Angeles of the novels a projection of Marlowe's mood?: No, and the distinction is the useful part. Surroundings that agree with the protagonist tell a reader nothing the protagonist has not already said, and Charles Baxter has a name for the habit, the fallacy of the objective correlative. Chandler's city runs its own errands, and it does so hardest where the money came from. You can see the old oil field from the windows of the Sternwood house, the sumps that paid for the orchids, working away below the lawn and indifferent to whoever is standing at the glass. At the end of the book Marlowe is down there among them. Copy that indifference and your pages get colder in the useful direction.
What did Chandler object to in the classic puzzle mystery?: He put the complaint in print in 1944, in an essay called "The Simple Art of Murder". The charge was that the English detective novel had turned killing into a diagram, solvable and weightless, with people arranged to suit the puzzle rather than the other way round. He was arguing against a school, and he was unfair to its best work. A reader arriving here from Doyle should hold both things at once, because the fair-play contract is a genuine achievement and Chandler wanted something the contract had no way of delivering, which was consequence. He took out the diagram. He put in a bill.
Where should a writer start with Chandler, without the costume?: Start with the order of a sentence. Report the physical thing first, then let the last clause grade it, and keep doing that until the shape comes without thinking. The trench coat and the office bottle are not the technique. After the sentence, take on the two structural habits, the errand that raises a price and the setting that declines to agree with the narrator, both of which transfer to any genre at all without a single fedora. The wisecrack comes last, once there is enough underneath it to be worth concealing. A joke with no judgment behind it is a joke, and his are load-bearing.

Ready to improve your draft with direction?

Open Draftly, bring your draft, and move from stuck to a stronger draft without losing your voice. Editors are on standby when you want a deeper pass.

Fix My Draft

Free welcome credits included. No credit card needed.