Life and crimes of an enigma

Once, in response to a newspaper Q&A asking me to name the influences on my writing, I said, ''No Chandler, no Corris.'' It was true - my early Cliff Hardy novels were pastiches of Chandler with a leavening of Ross Macdonald.

Most writers of hard-boiled private eye fiction, such as Robert B. Parker, Loren Estleman, Timothy Harris, Howard Engel and many other ''post-Chandlerians'', as the critics call us, would acknowledge the same debt. I had read and

re-read Chandler's novels and stories and had absorbed his tropes and rhythms before I started writing myself. I am still conscious of the influence when I write descriptions and dialogue, and my books exemplify Chandler's aphorism: scene is more important than plot.

John Sutherland, in his entertaining, opinionated compendium Lives of the Novelists, says in his entry on Chandler that he'd sacrifice a good deal of the well-known sad details of Chandler's later life for more information on his life in the years before he became a writer. No need to make the sacrifice, Tom Williams has answered his call.

The chief contribution of the book is the detail on Chandler's family background, youth, early manhood and mature pre-writing years in Los Angeles. Earlier biographies by Frank McShane (1976) and T. Hiney (1999) skated over this subject matter comparatively lightly, for lack of source material, and got things wrong. Williams claims to have taken six years to research and write the book and, while acknowledging that Chandler was an enigmatic character given to self-mythologising, has spared no effort to cover the ground and dig for the truth.

Much of the detail uncovered is unsettling: the alcoholism of his father, Chandler's crippling shyness, unnatural emotional dependence on his mother and later his wife, and his lifetime struggle to justify and live up to his high estimation of himself. A user of people, a blamer of his misfortunes on others and an alcoholic, Chandler was in many ways a nasty piece of work.

Chronicling failures, deceptions, parsimony and selfishness, Williams continually attempts to document Chandler's positive side. It comes down to little more than saying he could be charming when sober, and it suited him, and was kind to his cat.

But he could write in a way no one else had ever written before him and the biography is also valuable for focusing closely on exactly how he was able to do this. Starting late, nothing came easily. He struggled to execute his vision and needed the props of his mother, wife and booze as he drew on his education, imagination and experience to provide the material for his highly original work.

Along the way, Williams, drawing on every source available, corrects some of the misconceptions fostered by other writers: when Chandler attended Dulwich College, Marlowe was not yet the name of one of the school's houses; he was not blown up during World War I to land in a shell hole while his whole platoon died around him; he did not cruise up and down the Californian coast reading pulp magazines; and he did not move from teetotalism to heavy drinking to write The Blue Dahlia screenplay - he was already drinking steadily.

Williams's cumbersome title is unfortunate, but his prose is workmanlike. There are some flaws: he tends to repeat the same information not too many pages apart; his explications of Chandler's novels, stories and films are too long, given that most readers will be familiar with them; and I found that his use of Ray, rather than the writer's surname, throughout struck a false note, as if David Marr had referred to his subject as Patrick, page after page. It's unprofessional, and an editor should have strongly advised against it.

But, failing the discovery of lost manuscripts or a cache of letters, this is likely to be the last word on Raymond Chandler. Racist, sexist and homophobic though some of his work is, the man who wrote something with the simplicity but resonance of this - ''I rode down to the street floor and went out on the steps of the City Hall. It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way - but not as far as Velma had gone'' - gave something to the world.

A MYSTERIOUS SOMETHING IN THE LIGHT: RAYMOND CHANDLER, A LIFE
Tom Williams
Aurum, 386pp, $39.99