THE SHORT GOODBYE
In the photograph, the private allows himself a tight little smile as though he has just shared a wisecrack. A cutaway doublet-style jacket drapes his slight, 140-pound frame. He’s about 5-foot-9 and wears a khaki kilt apron with a pocket replacing the traditional sporran. His knees are bare. He holds the barrel of a rifle with his right hand, the butt resting on the ground. He looks like an underfed accountant forced into a Highland uniform, which is just what he was. Before enlisting in the military, he had worked as a bookkeeper for a creamery, handling its ice cream accounts.
His parents’ marriage had been cut short by his father’s alcoholism. The enlistment form asked whether his father was living. “I don’t know,” he wrote. He had turned 29 the previous month and had last seen his father when he was 7.
The Great War in Europe had been raging for three years by the time the photograph was taken. The private was entirely unknown. Years later, in 1939, as the world staggered toward another conflagration, he published, at age 51, his first novel, The Big Sleep.
Before enlisting in the military, Chandler had worked as a bookkeeper for a creamery.
Today, Raymond Chandler’s name evokes a punchy, hard-boiled style of detective fiction. His tough-guy private eye, Philip Marlowe, a boozer, as Chandler was, has been portrayed on the big screen by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, James Garner, and Robert Mitchum. Marlowe, a loner, is an honest man making his way through the seamy Los Angeles underworld. He is quick with a quip and
