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http://www.cinairoman.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=18045#p18045
It's well-known that John Dickson Carr and Raymond Chandler hated each other.It's less known, however, that they had much in common.
- Alcohol. Both had a serious problem with it, although Carr was more successful in hiding it than Chandler. Addiction contributed in a large part to their physical and artistical decadence.
- Women. Opposite sex played a great role in their personal lives and therefore in their works. The way they describe their heroines is revealing, sensually
detailed for Carr, filled with leacherous metaphors for Chandler. Women in a general way often have a greater role in their stories than men, and survive
longer in reader's memory. So Carr and Chandler undoubtedly loved women, yet their works also show how uneasy their relations with them probably were. Gender roles in Carr often are reversed, with the girl almost courting the hero, and his heroines's often incoherent behavior witnesses his difficulty to understand women. He never was, though, a hard misogynist alike Chandler, whom view of women comes right from the Ecclesiast.
- Family. Both were deeply sceptical about it. I've already told about fathers and mothers in Carr's universe, which surely echoed his personal experience (why did he try to make his wife believe his mother was dead?). Chandler little knew
his father (he called him "a bastard"), and spent his childhood with his mother, which whom he had a very strange relation. When she finally died, he hurried up marriying an eighteen-years older woman. From "The Big Sleep" to "The Little
Sister", Chandler's view of family is consistenly gloomy and distrusting.
- Artistical approach. Carr was as prolific and imaginative as Chandler was not,painfully writing seven novels in the same time Carr wrote double. Yet both were stylists, very gifted for atmosphere, descriptions and dialogue. They also belong to the rare mystery writers of their time to not only writing, but thinking over the genre they practicioned. Both settled a real theory of mystery fiction which their works illustrated. "The Grandest Game in the World" in this view is the ennemy twin of Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder".
- World-view. Carr and Chandler bot they lived in, sparkled with some aristocratical (and, in handler's case,puritan) feelings. To them, modern world is completely rotten, morally decadent.Gideon Fell's famous lines in "Below Suspicion" could summarize all Chandler's works. Yet their way to deal with this disliked world is different, however:
while Carr tries to escape it, Chandler faces it.
- England. Both Carr and Chandler were huge anglophiles, with mostly English-oriented education and tastes. Chandler spent his childhood in London,and Carr came back to America for political reasons only. They never really felt
at home in their native land: Chandler obviously disliked American way of life,and Carr's stories set in his country often belong to his weakest ones.
- Game's End. First a strange coincidence: both Carr and Chandler died in their 71th year. They had very sad last years, marked by illness and degradation. It was not better on an artistical level: both ended their careers with mediocre,not to say disastrous, works, unworthy of them("The Hungry Goblin" and "Playback").
What do you think of it?
Xavier
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