You laugh, I laugh, but the truth is, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. At it's most basic and direct translation, Chandler just means that in the rough and tumble world of hard-boiled detecting, there's always one more gun-totting goon more than willing to speed your plot along with a .44 and a foreboding entrance.

Did Chandler intend any deeper wisdom? Any wider concept in that simple statement?

Hell if I know, and yet, I still see the wider reason there. Let's look at a few examples of that concept that popped into my head at three in the morning last night when I should have been sleeping.

So let's say you're writing a science fiction, maybe some kind of great big beautiful space opera full of characters -way- cooler than Lucas.*

Let's say you've just described (in thirty pages no less) what the intake of the engine looks like and how it is the ship is powered for interplanetary travel. Also, there's a three page essay on toilets in space.

Even your characters seem a little bored waiting around for something to happen.

Try having an enemy space pirate ship show up and threaten to “blow them out of the sky!”

Why, because pirates are cool. I mean, because action is what makes pages turn. Dry data and technical speculation is really one of the cool parts about hard science fiction on a grand scale, however, if you really want to get the reader to the part of the story where you discuss the ships air recycling system, you might consider throwing in pirates action in order to get them jazzed about reading on.

Don't do Scifi? No problem.

Let's say that you write Fantasy. More than that, you're writing the next great Epic Fantasy Novel. Tolkeen can eat your shorts by the time you churn out all 300 thousand words of this baby.

The first half of the book is written, and you've described the millennia of historically important points. You've written three complete languages-- including two dialects of your gnomish language because your beer gnomes speak with a drunken slur. You've established the political climate and described in long flowery detail how each of the worlds nations could at any point fall into war with each other.

So what's next? Well, why don't you take that farm boy who doesn't know he's 'the one' who will fulfill some ancient prophecy and have him shot full of crossbow bolts on his way home from the market. I'm not saying you -have- to kill him, but I'm saying nearly killing him might sure as heck change the scope of your story and give your readers something to sit up and take notice of. A 'the one' full of bolt holes who can't fulfill his destiny and has to pass it along to the fat pig farmer next door would certainly put a lot of epic fantasy on its ear.

Another example.

Let's say you're writing paranormal romance. (Why not, there's a market for it.) So let's say you've just had three pages of hawt smexy vampire on vampire hunter luvin and now that you feel the need to shower off and maybe pop into a confessional, something has to happen....

I know! Have one of the other vampire hunters burst through the door with a flame thrower in his hand and turn Lestat into so much dust buster fodder.

Why? Besides the fact that it's funny? It's unexpected. In the romance industry, you here over and over again people berate the genre for being formulaic and repetitive. So do something WAY outside the box, like lead your readers on with hawt vampire luvins only to destroy your vampire and -really- put your heroin into a new and exciting world of revenge and luvin.

Okay, right, genre writing is for the illiterate and people who drool on themselves?**

No problem, Chandler's line works even in the literal literary world. Take a piece of good old fashioned contemporary literature.

Let's say your angsty but thoughtful hero is at work (he works at a coffee shop, of course, while he's trying to get his writing off of the ground.) Let's say for this example that you've spent the last ten pages with him thinking about his quirky family, bad childhood, and disastrous break up. From here, you could have him decide that the world is a lie and that ultimately all things fall into nothing....

Or you could have someone walk into the cafe with a gun, rob the place, and shoot a co-ed while your hero is all but powerless to stop it.

Why? Because that's real life. It makes things happen, and it's a real honest to God tragedy that will really give your hero something to wax eloquent about for days at a time!

Action is good, it stretches all your thinking muscles and it gets the pages turning. When things happen in a book, things happen, and that's what makes a story a story and not just, say, a three hundred page blog entry.

*Not a comment on my opinion about Lucas, just an example.

**Not my opinion, forgive the hyperbole.