Who Goes There?

Crime fiction was and still is a genre kept in its own ghetto, like SF and fantasy, but as with those other genres it sometimes has broken into the literary mainstream. One of the big success stories of classic crime fiction is Raymond Chandler, who aside from writing some poetry had not tried his hand at writing professionally at all until he was in his forties. (This is a lesson in how if you’re such-and-such an age and wondering if it’s too late to try your hand at writing, don’t worry.) He was born in Chicago but came to be deeply affiliated with LA, which is no surprise given that that nearly all his novels take place in LA and its surroundings. He also spent some of his formative years in England, getting an education there, hence his US-UK dual citizenship. In fact Chandler’s knowledge of England plays into today’s story, which is not a detective story (although there is a detective in it), nor is it set in the US at all, but instead Victorian-era London. “The Bronze Door” is the only Chandler story to be published first in an SFF magazine, and it saw print the same year as The Big Sleep, his debut novel. Chandler had turned fifty by this point. He ended up writing only seven novels plus a rather modest supply of short fiction (he mostly stopped with the latter by around 1940), but it was enough.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1939 issue of Unknown. It has the rare of actually appearing in a genre magazine twice, being reprinted in the October 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can also find it in the Chandler volume Collected Stories.

Enhancing Image

James Sutton-Cornish is fat and middle-aged, and also given to day drinking, which angers his wife to the point where she can’t take it anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Sutton-Cornish have been living in the estate of the former’s ancestors, which really is the only thing that belongs to him; everything else belongs to the wife, including Teddy, their dog. “The rest was hers. Even the clothes he wore, the money in his bank account. But the house was still his—at least in name.” With their divorce underway, James heads out and goes into a bit of a stupor, and catches a cab—that being a horse-and-buggy, not a car. This strikes him as odd, but not that odd. “The Bronze Door” is presumably set in what was then the present day (the 1930s), and at one point James refers to “the war,” probably meaning World War I. But the cab seems to go back in time, at least to the Edwardian era, so that as James makes his way to Soho he also travels to an older, darker, grimier London. He doesn’t like this very much. He ends up at an auction house, and this is where he comes across the door of the title, which is a pretty weird contraption. It’s a metal door that can be placed anywhere and which opens one way, to—somewhere. Possibly nowhere. The theory we get from James is that the bronze door comes from the Golden Age of Islam, in which a sultan or whoever would use it as a method of hiding inconvenient concubines. (It’s Chandler, so of course sex comes up, but it’s also Unknown so it’s very tame.) James takes the door back home with him. Hilarity ensues.

Not that James was a good person to begin with (actually he and Mrs. Sutton-Cornish were arguably made for each other in that they’re both kinda evil), but “The Bronze Door” sees Our Anti-Hero™ slip into outright villainy by the simple abuse of a magical power. We see what the door does by some criminal who’s on the run going through it and simply vanishing into thin air, and it doesn’t take long for James to get a few ideas as to how the door might be applied to his benefit. Like getting rid of a bitchy ex-wife. There’s a tinge of misogyny here, as well as a homophobic remark that Chandler throws out there out of nowhere. At his home, James has portraits of now-gone family members, with the one sticking out being a general who was apparently an evil piece of shit, and also “fruity-looking” in the attire he wore for his portrait. Of course we’re supposed to infer that this general was depraved and debauched in some way, although in ways that Chandler is not really able to describe; for better or worse the general’s crimes are left up to the imagination. Given that Chandler’s writing can be pretty hardboiled and graphic for the time, I have to wonder if “The Bronze Door” was written as this tame or if it got put through the washer by John W. Campbell and his secretary. In the introduction for the F&SF reprint, the editors say that Chandler had actually written a lot of fantasy fiction over the years, but without the intent of seeing it published. The implication is that there’s this treasure trove of such fiction written by Chandler, but given that Chandler died in 1959 and that literally none of this alleged fiction has turned up, I have to wonder if they were misled, or if perhaps Chandler’s estate had his unpublished work locked away indefinitely. Needless to say this is not as hardboiled as Chandler’s usual stuff, and also given that he turned mostly to writing novels after this point it’s easy to see how he only had one other fantasy story published.

I mentioned earlier that while it’s not really a detective story, “The Bronze Door” does have a detective, in the form of Detective-sergeant Lloyd, who starts out as being on the trail of the criminal James has sent through the door, and who later sniffs around once one too many people in the area go missing without a trace. Lloyd is probably the closest we get in Chandler’s work to his take on Sherlock Holmes, although Lloyd is less a Sherlock parody and more your typical image of a late 19th or early 20th century British detective. (I should also probably mention again that the time period for “The Bronze Door” is rather vague, since it’s implied to take place in what was then the modern day, but there are also hints of a pre-WWI Britain. Chandler doesn’t explain it really, and this might be my biggest quibble with the story.) Generally Chandler could’ve done to explain more of the setting, or rather given us a more vivid picture, but what he does give us is splendid in the moment. Nobody does the simile quite like Chandler. There are descriptions of things here that I’d never even thought of before, let alone seen in writing. Philip Marlowe, the jaded protagonist of all of Chandler’s novels, has a way with words that tells us he’s more cultured than he appears, being a chronically drunk private detective, and Chandler does what he can to translate this prose-poetry to a very different setting with a very different kind of protagonist. If this were a more typical Chandler story then Lloyd would be the viewpoint character, since he’s the closest we get to a hero in this ordeal, but instead for the most part we’re stuck in the shoes of the no-good upper-class bum that is James.

There Be Spoilers Here

After James has gitten rid of the wife, and also her dog, one gets the sense that the walls are closing in on him. He’s “won” in the short term, but now he’s lonelier than ever, firing the few people working at his estate and spending the rest of the story as a cranky loner, sinking deeper into what is clearly insanity. There’s a hint of the gothic about “The Bronze Door,” with both the architecture of James’s estate and the implication that he’s falling prey to a strain of insanity that runs in his family. It’s somewhere between “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Rats in the Walls,” although it’s not quite a horror story. Naturally murder (in effect if not the exact result) will out, and eventually Lloyd tracks down James. The two have a bit of a fight, although it doesn’t last long, which makes since given we’re told Lloyd is a lot more physically fit than the decrepit James. The ending as a whole is not surprising, but a neat touch is that Lloyd gets some PTSD from James disappearing into the bronze door, it being a supernatural event that he can never bring himself to explain. It’s something that would freak out anyone outside of The X-Files, even someone as experienced as Lloyd. But hey, he gets a promotion and becomes an inspector by the end, so it’s not all bad. The fact that we never see what becomes of people who go through the bronze door makes it just a bit creepier. I should mention that Chandler, aside from being a raging alcoholic, seemed to have episodes of depression, most severely after his wife died, wherein he actually attempted suicide, so his fiction would be pessimistic.

A Step Farther Out

As you can see, “The Bronze Door” is a little detour in Chandler’s oeuvre, being a fantastic mystery, but not a mystery of the sort that Chandler was used to writing. Then there’s the setting, of which we never see the like again before or after with Chandler. It’s predictable, but also a solid story that’s elevated by Chandler being frankly a better prose stylist than most of the people contributing to Unknown. When you read Chandler you read for the flavor of the words more so than the plot. Not sure how Campbell managed to procure a story from someone who apparently had no experience with fantasy, but it’s a charming and somewhat eerie diversion that sees a master outside of his realm of expertise.

See you next time.