[Continued from the previous post]
RC: That may be or may be not, but I still can’t write a book in two months. The fastest book I ever wrote, I wrote in three months.
IF: Simenon writes them in about a week or ten days.
RC: Mm-hmm. And so could Erle Stanley Gardner.
IF: Yes.
RC: In fact, Edgar Wallace…You know the story about Edgar Wallace going to Hollywood, and they asked him if he would write an original story for a screenplay. And they expected him to take about six weeks. This was on a Friday and he was back on Monday with it finished.
IF: Let’s hope they paid him for the whole six weeks.
RC: I think it was a flat sum.
IF: I’m glad to hear it. I find I’ve just been reading The Four Just Men series [by Edgar Wallace] again—just by chance. I do find they date terrifically of course, these thriller writers, so-called. Don’t you find that, when you look back on some of the old masters? E. Phillips Oppenheim and so on. The slang and the situations and the things that people eat and drink and their clothes and so on; motor cars and everything, the speed they move at—you know if a motor car goes at 40 miles an hour, everybody’s gasping with excitement.
RC: Don’t you find that about all fiction written a generation ago?
IF: Well, I don’t find it about the Russians for instance, because they don’t use so many contemporary things, so to speak. […] Individuals, persons, conversations between people, examination of people’s psychology of something, which of course is a permanent…
RC: But don’t you agree that the technical ability of quite ordinary writers today, ordinary successful writers, is far ahead of the technical ability of what we regard as classics.
IA: I quite agree. I remember the number of words they used to use. I happened to read a book not so very long ago by Henry James. There were enormous sentences and semicolons and commas and relative clauses, running down the whole page.
RC: And Tennyson—it’s worthwhile to stick it out.
IF: Yes—but you see, it’s hard going.
RC: I know, but you have to give something to it. Nowadays, you know, you’re not supposed to give anything to a book. It’s supposed to give you everything.
IF: Yes, quite so.
RC: In those days, of course, people had very few amusements. They had more patience. More time.
IF: Yes, they did.
RC: They had no radio, no television, and no cinema.
IF: Not many appointments, not many appointments.
RC: Walks in the country—about all they had. And reading. Playing the piano and singing silly songs around it, I remember it in my boyhood—it was like that.
IF: Yes. That’s what drove you to write your first sort of story for the Black Mask magazine, that atmosphere?
RC: No, it didn’t. I was an intellectual snob when I was a young man in London. I wrote very highbrow stuff. It took me about twenty-five years to get over it.
IF: Yes. I remember the first thing I wrote was published in Horizon, Cyril Connolly’s famous magazine. But your man, your hero Philip Marlowe—is he based more or less on yourself, so to speak? I see a certain…in fact, I see a distinct relationship between you and Philip Marlowe.
RC: Oh, not deliberately. If so, it just happens.
IF: One writes what one knows of course. My chap, I suppose he’s got some foibles that I’ve got, but I wouldn’t have said he had any relation to the person I think I am, but there it is.
RC: Can you play baccarat as well as he can?
IF: Not as well, no. I’d like to be able to. I love it. I love gambling.
RC: Takes almost unlimited money, doesn’t it?
IF: Well, I don’t know about unlimited. Depends if you can build yourself up some capital while you’re having some lucky play to begin with, and then play with the casino’s money from then on. I’m not a gambler in the sense that I can gamble when I’ve got no money left and say “take my house, take my car, take…”
RC: I don’t enjoy gambling at all. It’s the only vice I don’t possess.
IF: Oh, come, come. There are plenty left, aren’t there?
RC: Well, it is the only vice I don’t possess. I have no interest in gambling.
IF: No. Well, good for you. Would you say there are any basic differences between the English and the American thriller?
RC: Oh yes. Except for a few exceptions—I shouldn’t say “except for a few exceptions,” it’s a bad tautology isn’t it?—like yourself, and there are a few, the American thriller is much faster paced.
IF: Yes. We’ve got into a rather “tea and muffins” school of writing here, I think. The policemen are much too nice and always drinking cups of tea, and inspectors puff away at pipes and the whole thing goes on in a rather sort of quiet atmosphere in some little village somewhere in England.
RC: The policemen aren’t so darned nice here after all. I notice they’re getting smaller but they’re getting tougher. I know a five-time loser [who’s] just written a book, published by Secker & Warburg. His name is Frank Norn [?] and what he could tell you about the police would curl your hair.
IF: I don’t mean all of them.
RC: No—I wouldn’t mean all of them in the United States either. But a pornographic bookseller in Soho pays 200 pounds a week to the police.
IF: Do they read his books?
RC: Hmm?
IF: Does he give them his books to read?
RC: I don’t know, that didn’t come into the conversation.
IF: Now of course you’ve got the private-eye tradition which we haven’t got so much over here because our private detectives are on the whole just ordinary little people who go and follow married couples around and try to catch them out.
RC: Same as they are in America…
IF: Yes, but they’re written up to be much more.
RC: Oh, well…A private eye is a catalyst, he’s the man who resolves the situation. He doesn’t exist in real life. Unless you can make him seem real. (Pause) He doesn’t make any money either.
IF: Marlowe seems real to me—I mean, I visualize him quite clearly.
RC: Oh, I know, but that’s because I’ve known him so long. He’s not real as a specimen, as a private detective.
IF: I suppose the same thing applies to secret service agents. I’ve known quite a number of them, and on the whole they’re very quiet, peace-loving people whom you might meet in the street, sit next to them in your club, in fact two or three do sit next to me in my club…
RC: They must have an immense interior courage though.
IF: They must, because it’s a dull job and they get no thanks for it and they get no medals and their wives have a dreary time. […] Supposing we’ve got some man in an Embassy working under cover or something, and his wife has to sit there and watch other people being promoted while the usual is going on. [The wife] of the Assistant Naval Attache or something like that. It’s pretty bad on the wives too, they have a hard time, apart from the danger and all that still occurs.
RC: The wives of policemen don’t have a very good time in America.
IF: They don’t?
RC: The policemen get shot every once in a while.
IF: Yes, of course you shoot much more than we do over here.
RC: Well, they carry guns. Although I’ve known a police captain in La Jolla who carried a gun for 28 years and never used it, except when required to on the police pistol range to qualify. He never shot a man with it.
IF: I was had up in America going 96 miles an hour last year in a Studillac, which is a rather favorite car of mine—it’s a combined Studebaker and Cadillac—and I was taken along to the Sheriff’s office by this speed cop, and we got more or less friendly and then he showed his gun.
And I said “Have you ever let this off in anger?” and he said “I wouldn’t think of doing so.” He said, “The number of forms we have to fill up for every time we let off a gun is so dreadful. I might throw it at somebody but I’d certainly not fire it.” He was a wonderful chap.
On the wall of the Sheriff’s office—before I finally paid my twenty dollars and got away from it all—were a couple of poker work mottos written up, and the first one said, “God look down and bless this house.” And below was one saying, “Politicians never die, they only smell that way.” He was a real Sheriff that fellow. (Laughs)
RC: There are some very tough cops in America. On the east side of Los Angeles they’ll shoot at the drop of a hat—they really will. They’ll beat up a drunk and if a bystander protests they’ll drag him into an alley and beat him up.
IF: Why are they so tough, particularly there?
RC: Because they are in a tough district.
IF: Yes, the east side of Los Angeles. Why is that particularly tough, the east side of Los Angeles?
RC: Why is any district particularly tough? It usually gets tough as a result of the people who live there.
IF: Yes, thank you. I suppose we shall all start writing about juvenile delinquents before long; there see to be plenty of them about. But the thought bores me completely.
RC: No, I shan’t.
IF: Nor shall I.
RC: I shan’t. I don’t know the answer. What’s the use writing if you don’t know the answer?
IF: I know. Well—the answer is the break-up of the home, of course. The mother and the father—
RC: Oh—no.
IF: You don’t think so?
RC: No—not in America.
IF: I think it is here; the mother going out to work you know, there’s no home, no proper home for the boys.
RC: Surely in America they come from two classes: the very poor and those who come from rather rich families. Parents are always on the go and they give the boys plenty of pocket money, or the girls as the case may be. And they’re bored, they don’t know what to do with their lives.
IF: On the other hand, of course, you’ve got these big mixed races—the Puerto Ricans, and the whole of the Negro section. Harlem now is very, very tough. I think I’m right in saying—aren’t I?—that there are very few Americans who’d think of going down there in New York at night—a white American. Is that true?
RC: Oh, or Central Park. [It] runs these gangs.
IF: Yes.
RC: But you know, there was a wave of burglaries with vandalism in Atlanta, Georgia, a couple of years ago. And when they finally found out who was doing it, they were all sons of very well-to-do people.
IF: Really?
RC: They broke into houses, stole, destroyed all sorts of things. It was a thrill. That’s all. They do it, as they say, for “tricks.”
IF: Well, we seem to be talking all the more about real crime than fictional crime. Are you planning any kind of a new book now? You’ve got this one coming out today.
RC: Well, I’ve got myself in a bad spot now.
IF: In what way?
RC: A fellow has to get married.
IF: Oh, I was going to ask you about that…this woman—
RC: It’s going to be a struggle.
IF: He is—Marlowe’s going to get married, is he?
RC: Yes, but there’s going to be an awful struggle, because she’s not going to like him sticking to his rather seedy profession, as she’d consider it, and he is not at all going to like the way she wants to live, in an expensive house in Palm Springs with a lot of freeloaders coming in all the time. So, it’s going to be a struggle, it might end in divorce, I don’t know.
IF: Oh golly. You wouldn’t like to go and kill her off perhaps?
RC: Kill her?
IF: Yes?
RC: Oh no, she’s too nice.
IF: She is, is she? Linda, isn’t it?
RC: Yes, much too nice to kill off.
IF: Ah. Oh well. Well, I don’t think my fellow is going to get married.
RC: Of course if I had Marlowe killed off it would solve a lot of problems. I wouldn’t have to write any more books about him. (Laughs)
IF: Well you’ve always meant to write a play anyway, haven’t you?
RC: Oh yes, I want to write a play.
IF: Yes.
RC: I want to write a play about [Lucky] Luciano, if he’ll let me.
IF: Yes, that’s because your visit to Luciano was so fascinating the other day?
RC: I think there’s a play in that.
IF: Yes. He must be a remarkable man. You feel he’s really been badly done by?
RC: Absolutely so. I’m quite sure of it.
IF: Extraordinary, the way he’s become, sort of, a type name for the criminal—like all these other people, in the old days of Bugsy Siegel and so on. But Luciano seems to be living a very sort of quiet life down there.
RC: Well, he has to.
IF: Yes. He’s got a medicinal supplies factory or something of that sort, hasn’t he?
RC: Medical furniture—hospital furniture. He was outside the law, from the time when everybody was—during the bootlegging era. He ran gambling places and as Americans will gamble and they’ll find places to gamble—I could find places right on Sunset Boulevard—there’s gambling houses.
IF: Yes. But why was Lucky Luciano made such a particular target?
RC: Well, he was a pretty big man in his line. It was good publicity.
IF: Yes.
RC: And he was rather defenceless. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the gangs put him up.
IF: Yes, as a target.
RC: Happens so often, you know. To have a scapegoat.
IF: I was in Rome about ten days ago and I gather there are over 2,000 deported Italian American gangsters hanging around Italy, not knowing what to do. Must be quite a job for the Italian police having to keep tabs on them the whole time.
RC: Well, they don’t have to have deported Italian American gangsters in Naples—practically everybody there is half a gangster.
IF: Yes, I know, it’s increased the gangster population fairly considerably.
What we’ve talked about really are the basic ingredients of thrillers. One could write almost a couple of books on what we’ve been talking about. The Luciano situation is one, and a detailed story of one of these gang killings you’ve described—the man coming down from Minneapolis—is another one.
But I wonder what the basic ingredients of a good thriller really are. Of course, you should have pace; it should start on the first page and carry you right through. And I think you’ve got to have violence, I think you’ve got to have a certain amount of sex, you’ve got have a basic plot, people have got to want to know what’s going to happen by the end of it.
RC: Yes, I agree. There has to be an element of mystery, in fact there has to be a mysterious situation. The detective doesn’t know what it’s all about, he knows that there’s something strange about it, but he doesn’t know just what it’s all about. It seems to me that the real mystery is not who killed Sir John in his study, but what the situation really was, what the people were after, what sort of people they were.
IF: That’s exactly what you write about. Of course you develop your characters very much more than I do, and the thriller element it seems to me in your books is in the people, the character building, and to a considerable extent in the dialogue, which of course I think is some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today. And I think basically we’re both of us to a certain extent humorists too. Both of us rather like to bring in…
RC: That’s true.
IF: Which possibly might not come out at first sight, but we like making funny jokes.
RC: A solemn thriller is really rather a bore.
IF: Yes, and there’s something very seedy about it. You see, a man like Mickey Spillane, was a man without any humor and [with] a lot of unattractive characteristics as well—and I tried reading a few of his books but there’s something very seedy and sort of smelly about them to me, I found.
RC: To me also. Me also.
IF: Yes, it’s funny, it comes right through the writing…
RC: It had a tremendous appeal to the armed services. Probably the greatest thing done for masturbation in the last twenty years. (Laughs)
IF: But what happened (Laughs) to Mickey Spillane since? He hasn’t written a book for ten years, has he?
RC: Well, I told you. He’s joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
IF: Oh, so you did, yes.
RC: Which is a sort of Holy Roller sect. Very sincere in themselves but terribly ignorant—primitive—in their religious ideas. They seem so to me. But I’m not a religious person really. Well I was, once.
IF: Yes…yes. Do you think that it was remorse for what he’d accomplished in his books that suddenly decided him—
RC: No. I don’t think it was that at all. I don’t think he had any remorse. Some ideal got hold of him. He’s obviously a man of very superficial emotions.
IF: Yes. In fact a rather simple character all together. I wonder what started him off writing at all.
RC: I don’t know either.
IF: Incidentally, there’s a wonderful article in this month’s number of the London Magazine called “Mrs. Handy’s Writing Mill”; you ought to get a hold of that. It’s about a woman on the west coast who creates best-seller writers. She created [James] Jones, [who wrote] From Here to Eternity. Taught him how to write and made him write the book, sat over him while he did it. And now she’s got a sort of farm and writers come to her and get turned into best-seller writers. It’s a fascinating little article—you ought to read that.
RC: It may be a fascinating article but the whole idea is disgusting to me as a writer.
IF: That’s what the man who wrote the article says. That it’s an extraordinary proceeding. When you go there—supposing I went to her, I should be put down first of all to writing out pages and pages of Hemingway, straight out of the book, copying them down, to get me into the habit of writing like a good writer, so to speak.
And then her theory is that in everybody there is a book of some sort, if only they can write—automatically write or write automatically—if their own ideas are sufficiently interesting, or their own experiences, to produce a best seller. And this man writes three or four books that are in the best seller list in America now, that have been turned out by Mrs. Handy’s Writing Mill.
RC: Hmm…well, I don’t think that means very much in our business. If the book is long enough and dirty enough it can very easily become a best seller, but it must be long and it must be sexy.
IF: That applies in America of course, you do have these huge books, don’t you? I can’t carry them around, they weigh too much. But why is this? Is it value for money, do you think the Americans like getting these big books?
RC: I don’t know. I don’t know at all.
IF: They’re double our length.
RC: Americans are not book buyers. Book renters, not book buyers, and a lot of them of course don’t read books at all. They just read magazines, newspapers, or look at television.
IF: Yes, that applies to a certain extent here, of course.
RC: But—no, it’s worse there because television goes on from six o’clock in the morning till two o’clock the next morning. And you have the choice around Los Angeles, where I live, of ten channels.
IF: Ghastly. I’ve got a television set but I’ve only once looked at it.
RC: […] Is yours the BBC?
IF: Yes, it doesn’t get the commercials.
RC: Well, that’s all right. I’ve got a long cord that switches off the sound when the commercial comes on. You see the chap, you see his mouth going on but can’t hear a word he says. (Laughs)
IF: But I find that television is simply an additional appointment in the day. All right, Raymond Chandler is appearing on television at 6:30. Well, it means I’ve got to get back from my office and meet Chandler on television at 6:30. It’s an additional chore, it seems to me.
RC: Well, that would be a waste of time—but I like watching Wimbledon.
IF: Yes, it’s very good for sports. However, look here, we’d better be getting back to our subject…
RC: It is very good for some dramatic plays. BBC did The Caine Mutiny court martial—I thought it was marvelous.
IF: Didn’t see it.
RC: Couple of Sundays ago. I think it was the best thing I ever saw on television.
IF: As good as that? Well, that’s a good plug for the BBC anyway. Have you got any particularly favourite thriller writers, Ray? People you automatically buy more or less blind?
RC: No. I don’t have to buy them. They send them to me free.
IF: They do?
RC: The publishers do.
IF: You’re lucky. I got one free the other day, which I haven’t read, which sounds rather exciting. It’s going to be published by Arthur Barker in August and I got an advanced proof copy, unrevised and confidential.
RC: We don’t have those bound proofs in America.
IF: Well, I think his is rather a departure here. But Arthur Barker obviously thinks very highly of this fellow. He’s called Kenneth Royce—My Turn to Die—and it’s coming out in August and certainly the first page is good. I can tell you that much. Then I’ve just bought The Taste of Ashes by Howard Browne, which looks good.
RC: I guess he’s improving quite a lot. Must be.
IF: He wrote a book called Thin Air before, I don’t know if you’ve read that.
RC: No.
IF: Well, it’s very good. And then another one called Operator I’ve just bought, haven’t read yet. […] It’s by a man who wrote a very good one called The Big Bite, which was a wonderful blackmail story published last year—Charles Williams. Very good indeed.
RC: I couldn’t read it—made me nervous.
IF: It did?
RC: I remember the book, but I couldn’t read it—made me too damn nervous.
IF: Oh, that’s the finest thing you could say about it—to the writer. I think the whole object of a thriller is to make you nervous.
RC: I don’t like that edge-of-the-chair writing.
IF: You don’t? You always says you like mine but perhaps…
RC: No—it isn’t just that.
IF: Isn’t it?
RC: No.
IF: Well—I think it is. Then there’s this, Norman Lewis’ The Volcanoes Above Us, which is really more a novel than a thriller, but I found it had most of the ingredients of a thriller to read. There’s mystery and very tight hard writing—wonderful book. He writes very well, Norman Lewis—he’s got an extraordinary visual eye. Photography is one of his main hobbies I think, and he’s got this astonishingly clear eye for detail and situation. Very remarkable man.
RC: Did you read a book called Knock and Wait a While?
IF: No, I didn’t.
RC: An American writer whose name I forget. It’s an intelligence agent story and I thought it was very real.
IF: I’ll write that down. Get hold of it.
RC: His assignment was to prevent a Russian girl from being kidnapped aboard a Russian ship and taken back to Russia.
IF: Knock and Wait a While.
RC: I think his name’s Steele but I’m not positive. (The author was William Rawles Weeks)
IF: And who was this man James Anthony Phillips you were mentioning to me?
RC: James Atlee—A-T-L-Double E.
IF: James Atlee Phillips. You said he was one of the most remarkable mystery writers in America, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of him.
RC: Well, I think he’s a darned good writer by any standard.
IF: What’s he written? This book Pagoda you mentioned?
RC: Pagoda, Suitable for Framing, The Deadly Mermaid, and he wrote one called The Shivering Chorus Girls, which I never could get hold of.
IF: That’s the trouble. I believe there’s some very good thrillers that publishers let get out of print and vanish off the scene. I’m sure in publishers’ lists there are a lot of very good thrillers tucked away that will be forgotten and ought to be brought out, and flushed out again. There aren’t enough good thrillers for me. I like reading them in aeroplanes and trains. The kind of books to pass the time with. They make no demand…
RC: There are a great many thriller writers in America who write directly for the paperbacks because they don’t have to share a royalty with the publisher.
IF: Quite.
RC: But they are short-sighted in a way. Because a publisher can make a much better deal for them, if they are any good. And there’s no prestige.
IF: No, there isn’t.
RC: They have finally begun to notice them in the papers, but there’s no prestige and they’ll print an additional, say 80,000 copies of paperbacks—well, then the thing dies.
IF: I see John MacDonald, who’s a great favourite of mine, he wrote A Bullet for Cinderella and several others—
RC: —Did you read his book about the multiple crash on the highway?
IF: No.
RC: Oh—that’s wonderful.
IF: It is? But he’s a marvelous writer and I think he keeps up his extraordinary good standard…
RC: Very prolific too.
IF: Very prolific.
RC: Must be an energetic chap. He lives in Mexico.
IF: Does he?
RC: He sent me his latest book but I can’t find it.
IF: He’s a very adept writer. Well anyway Ray, that’s more or less covered our points—I think we’ve probably gone off track a good deal, but thrillers are—
RC: —They can always cut it if they don’t want it.
IF: Anyway, thanks, Ray. It’s been nice to see you again.
RC: Well, it’d be silly of me to say that. I love to see you always.