The 1920s oil boom, a booted-out oil executive and film noir

— Had an oil executive not been fired during the Great Depression 80 years ago, some of the greatest 1940s film noir detective movies might have never been made and screen greats Humphrey Bogart and wife Lauren Bacall might never have achieved such renown as one of Hollywood's most sizzling couples of that era.

The booted-out oil executive was Raymond Chandler, one of the greatest writers of hard-boiled private eye fiction, who penned such classics as "The Big Sleep," "Farewell My Lovely," and "The Long Goodbye."

Chandler, who had studied accounting, went to work as a bookkeeper in the early 1920s for the Dabney oil syndicate, managed by oilman Joseph Dabney The syndicate financed oil drilling projects in California. Dabney struck it big at the Ventura field west of Los Angeles and became one of the most prominent small operators there.

The syndicate also was active in the area of Signal Hill, a 365 foot mound behind Long Beach, south of Los Angeles and site of a large oil find by Shell. Chandler, who eventually became a vice president of the Dabney syndicate, worked in its Signal Hill office.

Tom Hiney claims in his biography Raymond Chandler that Signal Hill, a few years after Chandler began work there, was producing 20% of the world's oil. Hiney's account of California oil ventures in the 1920s shows a rough-and-tumble industry rife with corruption and ballyhoo. He writes: "Most California oil ventures were funded by the sale of shares to the public, advertised in city newspapers and at 'picnic' open days ... Some advertised ventures would be deliberately over-issued and some were fraudulent from the start, with shares sold in fields that were known beforehand to be 'dry.' It was a maverick-led industry, but no amount of scandal seemed capable of dampening the public's fever to speculate."

In fact, the oil boom on Signal Hill was so frenzied that "next-of-kin persons buried in the Sunnyside Cemetery on Willow Street would eventually receive royalty checks for oil drawn out from beneath family grave plots," Daniel Yergin wrote in his Pulitzer award-winning book The Prize.

"True believers thought they could get rich buying a one five hundred thousandth share of a one-sixth interest in an oil well that had not yet even been drilled," Yergin wrote. Yet "Signal Hill was to prove so prolific that, almost unbelievably, some of those buyers actually made money on their investments."

Raymond Chandler, as vice president of the Dabney syndicate, earned a salary of $1,000/month, which rose to nearly $3,000/month. Those were princely sums for the times, when the average office worker's salary was about $125/month or so.

But in 1932 Chandler was fired from Dabney for alcoholism and absenteeism. The loss to the oil industry became popular fiction's gain. Chandler quickly sharpened his writing skills and sold a detective story to a pulp magazine the following year. He became known to readers for his snappy one-liners; for example: "If you don't leave I'll get someone who will," "He wanted to buy some sweetness and light and not the kind that comes through the east window of a church."

Chandler went on to write some of the best-known novels of his day. Then Hollywood beckoned and he turned others' detective novels into some of the most heralded movies of the World War II and post-war era. Writer William Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay for "The Big Sleep," starring Bogart and Bacall, a movie whose convoluted plot is almost indecipherable at times; even Chandler, asked during filming by director Howard Hawks to explain its assorted twists and turns, confessed he didn't know some of the plot lines.

Both "The Big Sleep" and Chandler's screen treatment of fellow noir author James Cain's "Double Indemnity," starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, contain references to the California oil fields. In fact, the plot of "Double Indemnity," which revolves around the two protagonists' murder of a husband, are able to freely conspire because the victim spends so much time out in the Long Beach oilfields.

For that movie, the disgraced former oil executive was nominated (along with co-writer Billy Wilder) for an Academy Award in 1944 for best screenplay, but did not win. Still, the controversial film set the stage for later noir movies of private eyes that contained plenty of hard-boiled realism.

Tweet