“Nightmare” Sees the Light of Day

A brief press notice about this discovery recently crossed my desk, and now The Guardian follows up with a full report:

An unpublished short story from one of the 20th century’s greatest authors is appearing for the first time in the Strand magazine this week, offering the suggestion that Raymond Chandler suffered from previously unknown insecurities over his writing talents.

“Nightmare” is an intriguing vignette that portrays Chandler, creator of the gritty fictional private detective Philip Marlowe, on the wrong side of the law, in a cell on death row awaiting execution for murder.

The magazine’s managing editor, Andrew Gulli, described the tale as a “sleep-induced sojourn” that he discovered among a cache of papers belonging to Chandler’s secretary and later-life companion Jean Vounder-Davis. A collection of her possessions, including Chandler’s typewriter, and a number of poems and private letters he had written, was sold at auction in New York in December.

The Guardian goes on to say that “The personal story also features Chandler’s wife, Cissy, who according to Gulli said she thought ‘Nightmare’ was ‘very funny’. It means the story was written prior to her December 1954 death, but dating it precisely gets ‘tricky’ beyond that, he said.” Gulli adds that “Nightmare”—described as being about “a man accused of a heinous crime that he can’t remember committing”—hints at Chandler not being as confident about his authorial success as he liked others to believe.

“The most revealing line in ‘Nightmare’ is Chandler’s aside: ‘It will remind me of the days when I used to get returned manuscripts’,” Chandler biographer Tom Williams said.

“Chandler loved to mythologize his own life. In 1933 he told his friend William Lever that ‘I sold the very first story I sent out’. This was ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,’ published in Black Mask in December that year.

“‘Nightmare’ casts doubt over this. Did he submit stories to Black Mask before ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’ that were turned down? Or was he thinking back to his first literary ambitions in London, or to the years after the [first world] war when he worked in the oil industry?”

Williams said it was “entirely plausible” that Chandler, who lived in London between 1900 and 1912 and became a British subject before returning to the US, had struggled to sell his writings before turning to full-time crime writing in the early 1930s after losing a job in the oil industry.

“Whatever the precise context, ‘Nightmare’ complicates the neat origin story Chandler liked to tell,” he said.

If you aren’t a Strand subscriber, you can pick up an $11.95 copy of Issue 76, featuring “Nightmare,” by clicking here.

READ MORE: “Chandler’s ‘Nightmare’ Sees the Light After Decades in the Shadows” (BookTrib).