Well, since Miker brought "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" up,
here's what I had to say about this story (and a bit about
the one that followed it) in my still-developing
dissertation. Please excuse the citations, which will make
little sense without an accompanying bibliography.
Chandler's first
short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," was published in
Black Mask in December 1933. He spent five months writing
this
"novelette" and was paid a mere $180; Chandler said that
after writing
"Blackmailers Don't Shoot," he "never looked back" though he
had "a good many uneasy periods looking forward" (Selected
Letters 236). His second story, published in Black Mask in
July 1934, was "Smart-Aleck Kill." Both of these stories
feature a private detective named Mallory. Paul F. Ferguson
suggests that this name is an intentional nod toward Sir
Thomas Malory, the fifteenth-century author of Le Morte
d'Arthur (225). Thus from the very start of Chandler's career
in detective fiction, he explicitly evoked themes of
chivalry, a trait that would become a hallmark of his
writing.
Chandler did
not seem to have a very high opinion of these two stories,
despite the fact that writing them occupied about a year of
his life. In a 1949 letter to publisher Paul Brooks, Chandler
said that
"Blackmailers Don't Shoot "has enough action for five stories
and the whole thing is a goddam pose"; both stories were,
according to Chandler, "pure pastiche" (Selected Letters
187). A few months later (in a letter to literary agent
Bernice Baumgarten), Chandler lamented the fact that
"Smart-Aleck Kill" was "weakish," while "Blackmailers Don't
Shoot" was "too full of massacres" (Raymond Chandler Speaking
225). Tom Hiney points out that seven of the nine characters
in "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" are killed by the story's close
(83). William Marling would seem to agree with the negative
valuations of Chandler's first two efforts, calling the first
story
"flawed by cliché¤ dialogue, motiveless actions, and pointless
turns of
plot" (Raymond Chandler 51).
Regardless
of the lack (or presence) of literary merit of Chandler' s
earliest short stories, there are a few features in them (in
addition to the apparent reference to Sir Thomas Malory) that
seem significant when considered in the overall context of
Chandler's life and later work.
"Blackmailers Don't Shoot" opens with the introduction of
Mallory, who wears a "powder-blue suit" (Collected Stories
3); this is an element that Chandler clearly "cannibalized"
for the opening scene of The Big Sleep. Mallory has come to
California from Chicago for work (and stays), a pattern that
matches the life of Chandler himself. Mallory has been hired
by a gambler named Landry, whose love letters to rising movie
star Rhonda Farr have apparently been stolen in order to
blackmail Farr. When Mallory meets Farr, she asks,
"What are you back where you live, darling? One of those
hoods they call private dicks?" (39); this might indicate
that Chandler knew that this was not a genre that many in the
literary community would find respectable.
It seems that
nearly everyone in this story is crooked (and involved in the
crimes at hand), and blackmail eventually turns into the
kidnapping of both Mallory and Farr. Mallory seems more like
a piece of wisecracking flotsam than a detective solving a
case; his main job in the story is surviving as the gang of
criminals kills each other off. Mallory tells Rhonda Farr
that he'll tell the police all that he knows (and thus
implicating Farr in the killings), and she exclaims, "You'd .
. . sell me out?" (41). Commodification of human life,
personal loyalty, and guilt itself are established as basic
themes. In response to Farr's question, Mallory asks if there
is any reason that he should protect her; this scene bears a
striking similarity to the sixth chapter of Dashiell
Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (when Sam Spade and Brigid
O'Shaughnessy have much the same conversation). Perhaps this
demonstrates that this story is indeed "pure pastiche," as
Chandler admitted. The readers of a pulp magazine such as
Black Mask would presumably not be bothered by a certain lack
of originality. Rather than being mere pastiche, Chandler
might have intended it as a nod to the debt he owed Hammett;
in "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler calls Hammett the
"ace performer" among the early writers of hard-boiled
detective fiction (998). This similarity to The Maltese
Falcon is made even clearer when Mallory discovers that Farr
is, in fact, behind the whole plot (as is Brigid
O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon). Finally, there are both
honest and dishonest policemen, with the latter seeming to
make up the majority; crooked cops are a major theme in
Chandler's fiction and may reflect a modernist distrust of
authority. In a world where many policemen cannot be trusted
to defend justice, to whom can the citizenry turn? Chandler's
champion presents one possible answer in a modernist search
for new authority.
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