Framed Book Jacket
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay.
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler's fiction parallels his screenplay treatments of the mid twentieth century. A refreshing but powerful read, his simple rendition of fact and smoothly woven crime plots produced classics. You won't find a wasted word in The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely.
In Framed I wanted to stay with the facts. I was always intrigued by the opening of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity... screenplay by Chandler. A bleeding Walter Neff's confession on a Dictaphone belt to his boss, Keyes, was an extraordinary use of technology to guide the reader through the character's demise. In the end Keyes arrives on the scene and bluntly informs Walter he's "all washed up."
Phyllis and Walter
McMurray was a sucker in the movie, but not as big a chump as William Hurt in Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat.
Both men were taken in by strong women with seductive charms and ulterior purposes. Ned Racine gets escorted down the pathway to incarceration while Matty Walker is rich and free on an exotic island.
Welcome to New Jersey
How would I create a basic, first person tale of woe in the type of genre suggested in Double Indemnity and Body Heat? I wanted Gordon Butts pulled into Connie's web because of his amoral character and his lust for her. Butts only fleetingly cares about what he has to do. In a way we all wish we could maintain such a steady course of ambition, but most of us are tempered by morality.
Fess up, Gordon
Butts is framed so deftly, he confesses everything on videotape, today's medium, to Hiss, the officer who has been after him for years.
With affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.
Charles Dickens
Further Reading
James M. Cain
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
Serenade (1937)
Mildred Pierce (1941)
Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942)
Three of a Kind (1944)
Career in C Major
The Embezzler
Double Indemnity
Past All Dishonor (1946)
Sinful Woman (1948)
The Moth (1948)
Jealous Woman (1950)
The Root of His Evil (1958)
Galatea (1953)
Mignon (1962)
The Magician's Wife (1965)
Rainbow's End (1975)
The Institute (1976)
Cloud Nine (1984)
The Enchanted Isle (1985)
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Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep, Knopf, New York, 1939.
Farewell, My Lovely, Knopf, New York, 1940.
The High Window, Knopf, New York, 1942.
The Lady in the Lake, Knopf, New York, 1943.
The Little Sister, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1949.
The Long Goodbye, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1953.
Playback, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1958.
Chandler Screenplays
Double Indemnity, 1944. (with Billy Wilder)
The Blue Dahlia, 1946.
Chandler, Raymond, with C. Ormonde,
Strangers on a Train, 1951.
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