Synopses & Reviews
Raymond Chandler was one of the most original and enduring crime novelists of the twentieth century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he became the writer who would create in Philip Marlowe an icon of American culture.
Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Angeles that was terrain and inspiration for Chandler's imagination, including the nearly two dozen apartments and houses the Chandlers moved into and out of over the course of two decades. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924, who would play an essential role in how he came to understand not only his female characters and Marlowe's relation to them but himself as well.
A revelation of a marriage that was a wellspring of need, illusion, and creativity, The Long Embrace provides us with a more complete picture of Raymond Chandler's life and art than any we have had before.
Review
"The Long Embrace may be the essential book on Raymond Chandler. Like his books, it offers a rational solution to a puzzle while at the same time retaining a sense of mystery." The Chicago Tribune
Review
"Compelling biography...a novelist's nonfiction triumph." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Review
"It is the inspired idea of the novelist Judith Freeman, played out in her atmospheric and unusual The Long Embrace, to try to tease out something of Chandler's nature by looking at his relations with women, and particularly with his wife of thirty years, Cissy. The book, Freeman stresses at the outset, will not be a biography...nor does she pick apart the novels for clues as many of his admirers...might do. Hers is, at heart, a more personal and curious mission: she confesses that she is obsessed by both Cissy and the man she habitually refers to as 'Ray,' and drawn to them for reasons she can't explain. The book becomes, therefore, a series of desultory, brooding, solitary meditations in which she drives around contemporary Los Angeles, looking, often in vain, for the places where Cissy and Chandler lived, and seeing what little she can dig up of a relationship that has always been mysterious." Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books (read the entire New York Review of Books review)
About the Author
Judith Freeman is the author of four novels The Chinchilla Farm, Set for Life, A Desert of Pure Feeling, and Red Water and of Family Attractions, a collection of short stories. She lives in Los Angeles.