Re: RARA-AVIS: Blackmailers etc.

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 04 May 2005


Juri,

Re your comments below:

> Please bear in mind that Chandler himself didn't
> want
> "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" to be reprinted. It was
> published only
> in the nineties. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm
> fairly
> positive about this.) Or the late eighties.

You're partly right. Chandler didn't want it reprinted. It finally was, in the '70's, in a collection called THE MIDNIGHT RAYMOND CHANDLER.

As to why he didn't want it reprinted, your suggested reason:

> It was one of his
> cannibalized stories, one which he took stuff out
> from to use in "Farewell My Lovely".

It was NOT one of his cannibilized stories. He considered including it in THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER, and he automatically excluded all "cannibilized" work.
 The reason he didn't want it reprinted was that, as you yourself pointed out, it wasn't very good.

At least it wasn't very good for Chandler. Remember, though, that, despite all those chiming in about what dreck "Blacmailers" is, bad Chandler is still better than, say, good Carroll John Daly.

Chandler, when he was considering the TSAM collection, said that "Blackmailers" was "pure pastiche." He wasn't that much kinder to the sequel, "Smart-Aleck Kill," in which Chicago PI Mallory takes on one more Hollywood case before dropping out of Chandler ouvre forever. However, Chandler apparently thought
"Smart-Aleck" decent to include in TSAM, though the main character's name was changed from Mallory to John Dalmas, causing all sorts of confusion to later Chandler scholars.

The stories that Chandler combined and expanded to make FAREWELL, MY LOVELY were "The Man Who Like Dogs,"
"Mandarin's Jade," and "Try the Girl."

JIM DOHERTY

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