THE DEEP ONES: "The Bronze Door" by Raymond Chandler

"The Bronze Door" by Raymond Chandler

Discussion begins on February 27, 2019.

First published the November 1939 issue of Unknown.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.unz.com/print/Unknown-1939nov-00090/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?52361

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Masters of the Macabre
Alfred Hitchcock's Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense
The Lucifer Society: Macabre Tales by Great Modern Writers

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/chandler.html
https://vimeo.com/18888625
https://tinyurl.com/y4lwpqc9

Boy, that cover art is funny. Sword-leaning man is unconcerned about 20-foot bear. After all, he's protected by a 2-foot rock wall.

Ross Macdonald once wrote of Chandler's hardboiled fiction that they were great for setting up dramatic scenes, but often didn't add up to a meaningful story. Certainly Chandler's plots are convoluted if not outright confusing (I'm looking at you, Big Sleep), but they undeniably include great atmosphere and memorable set pieces.

I'm curious to learn if any of that translates to a supernatural or even Weird setting.

>2 paradoxosalpha:

Ah, that's his Dad, yelling at him for not taking out the trash again. Teenagers stopped listening years before!

>2 paradoxosalpha:, >4 elenchus:

That's the Bear-God rushing out to greet his son with a giant bear-hug. No worries - he's got plenty of sons.

>3 elenchus:

You're right about Chandler and plot. I just added a related link up under Miscellany.

This blog suggests that Chandler wrote but never published "innumerable fantasies", never submitted for publication. It also claims Chandler published two such stories of the impossible, and I wonder what the other one is.

ETA And another blog suggests this might be the other story, a novel rather than a short: "His novel Professor Bingo’s Snuff was published in 1951; its main character inhales a magical snuff that makes him invisible. He then murders his wife, but later surrenders to the police."

Chandler does well by integrating the criminal elements of his noir stories into a supernatural setting. I wondered if the supernatural would be an awkward element, but his light touch there worked quite well along with his usual strong characterisations. Not the Weirdest story by any stretch, but I enjoyed it.

His famed ability for depicting memorable scenes also was on display. The hackney coach is a great example: easily could have been left out and the story proceed just fine, but it's a great introduction of the supernatural for the reader even if Mr Sutton-Cornish hasn't quite cottoned on.

Also typical of Chandler, the story didn't go quite where I anticipated. Chandler handled the switch in perspective from Sutton-Cornish to Detective-sergeant Lloyd quite well, the story flows and even has a satisfying closure (if I may put it that way) despite that abrupt shift. There was a similar tonal shift with the dog: after establishing the Pomeranian as a vicious annoyance, Chandler somehow almost makes me sympathise when Sutton-Cornish systematically shunts the dog toward the door, not an easy feat to pull off in such a brief passage.

I was a little surprised to find that owned a copy of this story: it's included in a Folio Society set of Chandler's short stories that "follows" (reprints) the Everyman Collected Stories.

Professor Bingo's Snuff is in there too, incidentally, but it isn't a novel. It runs from pages 426 to 465.

I'd knew that Chandler only became financially successful once he'd decided to concentrate on hard-boiled private eye stories. I'd somehow or other got the impression that his other work was artistically below-par. As @elenchus notes that's not the case here. The story is a thoroughly professional piece of work, with no "wobbles" or slackening of pace. Elenchus has pointed out the stand-out passages from a technical point of view, I think (for me the hackney coach pulled off another clever trick - finding the telling descriptive details of the horses's equipment, how the passenger communicates with the driver, etc. - that makes the coach all the more real (and at the same time all the more uncanny) - even for me, a reader who was never alive to experience horse-drawn vehicles on London's roads.

All the same it seems odd for this story to appear in Unknown which, I'd understood, was edited by John W. Campbell Jr. with an eye to promoting a particular type of fantasy whereby the rules of magic (or whatever) are stated and adhered to and are as binding as the rules of physics. If that rules was made primarily to discourage lazy plotting of the "with one bound Jack was free" variety, then fair enough, but the workings of the uncanny here are not clear...not so much the operation of the doors themselves as how the uncanny and Sutton-Cornish intersect. Is it the time-travelling or ghostly hackney coach, or the appearance of the former school fellow from "the Colonies", or just the grind of a dull life and unhappy marriage?

The London setting and City Gent main character are something of a novelty, but of course Chandler did go to an English public school (the same one as P. G. Wodehouse, incidentally).

There was something about the story that marked it - a bit like the E. M. Forster story of a few weeks ago - as coming from the mainstream of Anglo-American fiction and missing something that we would recognise as "Weird". A sense of awe or terror at the secret workings of the universe perhaps? Or conversely an attempt at building a Mythos? The thought kept recurring as Its reading this story, that it could be a Twilight Zone episode. I suppose that's because Rod Serling knew the mainstream tradition better than the Weird/Pulp tradition? (I've enjoyed the weirder (as in, adapted from stories in Weird Tales!) episodes of Night Gallery, but I know Serling wasn't happy about the direction that the producers took the programme).

Twilight Zone occurred to me as a referent, as well! -- though I wonder sometimes if my impression of that series is perhaps peculiar, since I only saw a handful of episodes which may have skewed my understanding of the show's sensibility.

>9 elenchus:
Well, as I made the same connection, I'd be inclined to say that your impression of the series is correct, although in fact I think the differing sensibilities of the main writers do come through in their scripts (and, I should add a caveat that I don't believe I've seen any stories from later than the third season).

I found Chandler's refusal to provide any explanation of how or why the door works this way to be reminiscent of Poe in that it really isn't necessary for the story. (The prime Poe example of this I think is "The Casque of Amontillado" where we don't know exactly what Fortunato has done.)

The coachman's admonition that James should just let things happen seems significant in that the only death James intends is Lloyd's -- and he fails at that. I liked how Chandler carries this theme through. James claims he didn't mean to kick Teddy. He didn't really mean for his wife and her dog to disappear. Or so he says. When he is frank and active in carrying out his desires, he fails.

Chandler was from Norwood -- South London which I didn't know until David Hambling mentioned it in connection with his Cthulhu Mythos which use the history and locations of that place.

There is more menace in the tension at tea with his wife

That is interesting, and I agree intentional on the part of Chandler. Not a direction many other authors would have taken the story, it leaves a distinct imprint certainly. And leaving the lingering paranoia with the inspector, who until then was a motive for justice, is interesting, too. A far cry from HPL or Poe, leaving us pitying or horrified with the narrator.

I liked this story. I haven't read a lot of Chandler, though I read The Big Sleep quite recently, but I'd never has guessed this was one of his.

I had an idea of Llewellyn, the cab and cabbie, and the bronze door as all part of a single supernatural snare set for Sutton-Cornish, and I was half-expecting Llewellyn to be finally revealed as the Devil or some such\; S-C being made a likely victim by his miserable circumstances. On the other hand, I was also quite hoping S-C would live to have a high old time on his wife's money.