Charles Green 

Raymond Chandler – quiz

Seventy-five years after Philip Marlowe stepped out for the first time in The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private detective is as sharp as ever. But have you solved the mystery of his enduring appeal? Test your knowledge of his life and work with our quiz
  
  


  1. Which poet famously said of Chandler's "powerful but extremely depressing books" that they "should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art"?

    1. TS Eliot

    2. WH Auden

    3. Ezra Pound

    4. Wallace Stevens

  2. Between 1900 and 1905 Chandler was a pupil at which English school?

    1. Eton

    2. Bedford School

    3. City of London School

    4. Dulwich College

  3. In The Big Sleep, what kind of shop is Geiger's pornography racket disguised as?

    1. A pet shop

    2. A tobacconist's

    3. A barber

    4. A bookshop

  4. Which publication infuriated Chandler by declaring Philip Marlowe "amoral"?

    1. Time

    2. New Yorker

    3. The Atlantic

    4. Harper's Magazine

  5. According to Chandler, all writing "that has any life" takes time to create because it is done using a particular part of the body. But which one?

    1. The solar plexus

    2. The very back of the brain

    3. The hands

    4. The inner ear

  6. In which essay did Chandler attack detective fiction that primarily seeks to create puzzles ("assembling an eggbeater")?

    1. Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel

    2. Writers in Hollywood

    3. The Simple Art of Murder

    4. Blackmailers Don't Shoot

  7. Who directed a 1978 film version of The Big Sleep which was set in England, rather than Cailfornia?

    1. Howard Hawks

    2. Woody Allen

    3. Billy Wilder

    4. Michael Winner

  8. To which play by Shakespeare does Marlowe allude in the final lines of Farewell, My Lovely?

    1. Hamlet

    2. Cymbeline

    3. Macbeth

    4. Othello

  9. What was Chandler's first published story?

    1. Smart-Aleck Kill

    2. Blackmailers Don't Shoot

    3. Nevada Gas

    4. Killer in the Rain

  10. According to Chandler, plausibility is largely a matter of what?

    1. Style

    2. Realism

    3. Originality

    4. Facts

Solutions

1:B, 2:D, 3:D, 4:A, 5:A, 6:C, 7:D, 8:D, 9:B, 10:A

Scores

  1. 3 and above.

    Raymond who?

  2. 6 and above.

    Oh well, he can be a little gritty for some ...

  3. 10 and above.

    Congratulations – you're officially a Raymond Chandler bore!
 

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