Raymond Chandler’s advice on being the boss

A self-help guide for bosses written by Raymond Chandler has been found among papers in a shoebox.

‘No working while drinking’: Raymond Chandler.

If you have risen up inside a company and find yourself presiding over people who call you Boss, you should remain calm.

“Do not let this upset you,” the author Raymond Chandler wrote in a list of tips for captains of industr­y that has been found among his papers. “Other people will still do the work for you.”

Titled Advice to an Employer, the list is a satirical take on corporat­e culture that seems to date from the early 1950s.

“It was found in a shoebox with some other papers of his,” said Andrew Gulli, managing editor­ of The Strand Magazine, which has published it for the first time.

It contains 10 pieces of advice for people who achieve greatness in the office or have had it thrust upon them.

“Never be at a loss for a word,” Chandler advises. “If you are, just look natural and the disagreeable aura will suffice.”

The crime author was not previous­ly known as a dispenser of managerial wisdom, though after serving in the First World War he had worked as an executive at an American oil company.

Laid off at the age of 44, he turned his hand to mystery writing. His fictional hero, the private detective Philip Marlowe, operates out of a shabby office “in the sort of building that was new in the year the all-tile bathroom becam­e the basis of civilisation,” he wrote at the start of The Little Sister. He does not employ an assista­nt and feels moved, occas­ionally, to do a spot of dusting.

Sarah Trott, author of War Noir, which traces the influence of wartime service on crime writers, believes that Chandler wrote his list of tips for employers when he took on a private secretary named Juanita Messick, with whom he became close. In one note to his employee he said that the office would be closed over Easter 1951, adding, playfully, that she must go to church for three hours on Friday. “On Thursday you will have to be guided by your conscience, if any,” he added.

Advice to an Employer appear­s to draw on Messick’s view of her boss as a workaholic and alcoholic and includes at the end a list of “personal requests we have heard from time to time, from employees to employer”. One is: “Please do not go to sleep in the middle of the day”; another is: “No working while drinking”.

In an accompanying piece in The Strand, Dr Trott writes that although Chandler was widely known as a grouch, “the piece’s humorous tone reveals a different side to the writer”. She said that this tone was seldom seen in his personal correspondence, which was far more guarded.

Mr Gulli said that Chandler’s agent, Helga Greene, inherited his papers, including Advice to an Employer, which eventually passed to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. “It shows that things have not changed in the world of office politics,” he added.

The Times