Raymond Chandler’s cannibalized stories. On the blog:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/04/20/raymond-chandlers-cannibalized-stories/

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Raymond Chandler’s cannibalized stories

If I were asked to name my all-time favourite crime-fiction writer, I would struggle to place anyone above Raymond Chandler. In contemporary literature the one who comes closest is Peter Temple, who, like Chandler, took up the practice in middle age. There’s a lot to be said for it.

A late entrant to the fiction-writing game, Chandler completed seven novels in his lifetime; another one was finished posthumously. For readers it’s a very manageable total. I read the novels in my twenties and reread a few in my thirties.

I was less systematic with Chandler’s shorter work, with the result that I recently picked up an unread – and unusual – collection, Killer in the Rain, first published in 1964. Philip Durham, who was a professor of American literature at University of California, introduces this Penguin edition:

During his lifetime Raymond Chandler published twenty-three short stories. Yet of this relatively small output only fifteen are generally known to the reading public. For a quarter of a century the remaining eight have lain buried in the crumbling pages of old pulp magazines. And these eight stories are among his finest.

Killer in the Rain collects those eight stories. Curiously, though I had never read them before, I had what I described elsewhere (Mastodon; Bluesky) as a recurring experience of déjà lu: half-familiar lines, characters, and scenarios.

It turns out that Chandler ‘cannibalized’ these eight stories for his novels – he once said in a letter that he ‘won’t discard anything’ – and for that reason excluded them from collections published during his lifetime. This textual cannibalization has its own short paragraph on Wikipedia.

Repurposing one’s writing is a common practice. But it made Chandler uneasy, Durham writes, and he was able to justify it ‘only by leaving such stories buried, virtually unknown in the pages of the rapidly disappearing pulp magazines’. I also feel that it’s trickier in fiction than nonfiction. Durham again:

Turning short stories into cohesive novels tested the extent of Chandler’s skill. It meant combining and enlarging plots, maintaining a thematic consistency, blowing up scenes, and adapting, fusing, and adding characters.

Primary among the characters, of course, was Philip Marlowe, one of the great fictional detectives. For this creation Chandler drew on earlier protagonists, Killer in the Rain making visible the progression from a nameless first-person narrator to Carmady, John Dalmas, and John Evans.

Things were more complicated for secondary figures:

Of the twenty-one characters in The Big Sleep, seven were drawn directly from ‘The Curtain’, six were taken from ‘Killer in the Rain’, four were composites from the two stories, and four were new creations.

Perhaps most interestingly, at least from this editor’s point of view, is the expansion of entire scenes. One passage in ‘The Curtain’, set in a greenhouse, is about 1,100 words; in The Big Sleep it’s about 2,500. Durham presents the change in miniature, from the following forty-two words:

The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the glass house dripped. In the halflight enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.

to these eighty-two:

The air was thick, wet, steamy, and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish colour, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

He finds both passages ‘intense and vivid’ and notes how each achieves its effect: the first through terseness, the second through mood, hyperbole, and ‘striking similes’. Chandler assembled Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake in similar fashion, with variations and twists on the original material.

After Chandler’s death in 1959, frequent calls for the publication of these ‘lost’ stories led eventually to Killer in the Rain, with Durham concluding that ‘there no longer seems any good reason why, provided their origin is clearly explained, they should be denied to the many thousands of Chandler’s readers’.

As well as being thoroughly enjoyable in their own right, the stories can be appreciated as raw material and inspiration for the better-known novels, and they offer a nice insight into an artful form of literary transmutation.

*

An etymological note on cannibalize: The OED dates it to 1655, in the sense ‘To overwhelm, destroy, or eat away at, as if by cannibalism; to crush or manipulate (a person)’. The more literal sense came along two centuries later.

The figurative sense ‘To absorb or destroy (something of a similar kind)’, used especially in business contexts, emerged in 1920; not until World War II do we finally see the word as used in the current post, defined as:

To use (something) as a source of parts or content for another of a similar kind; to take (a part) from one thing to use in another.

The first item the OED records as being thus ‘cannibalized’ is a wrecked French plane (‘parts are stripped from it for use on damaged Allied ships’ —Stars & Stripes, London edition, 26 Nov. 1942, caption). Cannibal itself is borrowed from Latin canibales and Spanish caníbal.

Literarischer #26März

„All us tough guys are hopeless sentimentalists at heart"

#RaymondChandler #Briefe Tod 1959

Il Fatto Quotidiano: Mickey Rourke sfrattato dalla sua casa a Los Angeles : non ha pagato 60mila di dollari di affitto arretrato

Era solo una questione di giorni ed è accaduto. Mickey Rourke è stato cacciato dalla sua casa di Los Angeles – già dimora del famoso giallista Raymond Chandler – per non aver pagato 60mila dollari di affitto arretrato. Un tribunale di Los Angeles ha reso esecutivo lo sfratto della ex star celebre negli Anni Ottanta, deliberando a favore del suo padrone di casa Eric Goldie.
Rourke a TMZ aveva confermato che non aveva pagato il canone perché la casa sarebbe stata infestata dai topi. Candidato agli Oscar e vincitore di un Golden Globe, Rourke aveva apparentemente lanciato una colletta, poi sconfessata, per permettergli di trovare un alloggio quando era arrivata la prima indicazione dello sfratto alle porte.

L’attore dopo il cinema si era reinventato pugile. Poi è tornato sul set negli anni 2000 con “Sin City”, “Iron Man 2” e soprattutto “The Wrestler”, una pellicola quasi autobiografica. Rourke era stato percepito allora come un attore “ritrovato”, simbolo di una Hollywood capace di perdonare e recuperare i suoi figli. Subito dopo il successo, tuttavia, qualcosa si era incrinato. Erano seguiti ruoli secondari o pellicole di scarso valore artistico, confermando una tendenza ricorrente nella sua carriera: l’impossibilità (o forse la volontà) di sfruttare appieno la propria notorietà attraverso decisioni più calcolate.
L'articolo Mickey Rourke sfrattato dalla sua casa a Los Angeles : non ha pagato 60mila di dollari di affitto arretrato proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Mickey Rourke evicted from his home in Los Angeles: he hadn't paid $60,000 in back rent.

It was just a matter of days and it happened. Mickey Rourke was evicted from his Los Angeles home – formerly the residence of the famous mystery writer Raymond Chandler – for not paying $60,000 in back rent. A Los Angeles court ordered the eviction of the former star, famous in the 1980s, in favor of his landlord Eric Goldie.

Rourke had confirmed to TMZ that he hadn't paid the rent because the house was infested with mice. An Oscar nominee and Golden Globe winner, Rourke had apparently launched a fundraising campaign, which was then abandoned, to allow him to find accommodation when the first indication of the eviction arrived at the door.

The actor, after the cinema, had reinvented himself as a boxer. Then he returned to the set in the 2000s with “Sin City,” “Iron Man 2,” and especially “The Wrestler,” a film almost autobiographical. Rourke had then been perceived as a “rediscovered” actor, a symbol of a Hollywood capable of forgiving and rehabilitating its children. Immediately after the success, however, something had cracked. Subsequent roles were secondary or of poor artistic value, confirming a recurring trend in his career: the inability (or perhaps the willingness) to fully exploit his notoriety through more calculated decisions.

The article Mickey Rourke evicted from his Los Angeles home: he hadn’t paid $60,000 in back rent comes from Il Fatto Quotidiano.

#MickeyRourke #LosAngeles #RaymondChandler #EricGoldie #Oscar #GoldenGlobe #Rourke #first #SinCity #IronMan2 #TheWrestler #Hollywood #IlFattoQuotidiano

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2026/03/13/mickey-rourke-sfrattato-dalla-sua-casa-a-los-angeles-non-ha-pagato-60mila-di-dollari-di-affitto-arretrato/8323168/

Introducing characters in a world-weary tone is a more than familiar noir trope at this point. And no novelist did this better than #RaymondChandler.

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