Answer to Linus W. question: I heard that Raymond Chandler was the first person to use and popularize the phrase "You can't win 'em all." Does anyone know who said it and in which book?"
 

So after a little legwork of my own, I found the answer to Linus' question in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs: Raymond Chandler was the first person to use this phrase in The Long Goodbye, when Roger Wade says it to Edward Loring.

I have a first edition copy of The Long Goodbye. Found by accident for 50 cents (in the 70's) at a Catholic school bazaar in Los Angeles, how apropos I say.

I am currently beginning to produce a 30-minute piece on Raymond Chandler for Mysteries & Scandals for E! Entertainment Television.

Are there any hard core, hard boiled Chandler collectors that would like to help us produce a great show? I am based in the LA area but can easily come to you in the US and Europe. I look forward to hearing from you.

This sounds like a dumb question-- but they were quasi-contemporaries and while Hammett invented the hard-boiled detective, Chandler refined him-- so, were the two of them ever friends? Does anyone know? None of the biographies I've read have mentioned the possibility at all.

I don't know if Hammett and Chandler could actually be called friends. They certainly knew each other. There is a photograph in Frank MacShanes's "The Life Of Raymond Chandler" of them both in a group at a Black Mask dinner. In his private letters Chandler always spoke well of Hammett both as a writer and a person. I haven't read of any comments by Hammett about Chandler.

In one of Lawrence Block's books, I think it might have been "The Burglar Who Quoted Kipling"..."The Burglar in the Library" or could have been "The Burglar Who Thought he Was Bogart". Block's protagonist, Bernie Rhodenbarr, is commissioned to steal a book either written and autographed by Hammett to a contemporary (Chandler??) or vice-versa. The book turns out to be a fraud and exposes a dislike of one author for another. Does anyone know what I'm talking about...obviously I don't.haha

Lori Shelton.

I think it was "The Burglar In The Library" The inscription in the stolen book showed Hammett couldn't stand Chandler. Perhaps Block has some inside knowledge.

I've read quite a bit about Chandler and there is a great bio of him on PBS. He was rather reclusive and his wife was apparently bedridden for some long period of time before she died. He was devoted to her. He drank a lot (as did Hammett) seems to go with the territory (writing, that is), but I don't remember anything about him having any correspondence or real relationship with Hammett. They were bound to have known one another, but as to a friendship, I really don't see one anywhere in what I've read or seen about Chandler.

Hammett had a very stormy relationship with Lillian Hellman which devoured a great part of both their private lives.

You're right about drinking seeming to go with the territory. Off hand I can't think of one writer who was not a heavy drinker. Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich, Faulkner,Hemingway,Fitzgerald,London, the list goes on and on.

You can add Mailer and Vonnegut to that list as well. J.D. Salinger said once he stopped drinking and started getting his life on track, he found he could not longer write. Quess it takes tremendous angst in one's life to make them truly a genius.