Just finished both The Lady in the Lake and The Little Sister and thoroughly enjoyed them. The latter had passages where Marlowe is the most cynical and bitter of the four books I've read by Chandler so far. But it didn't put me off at all, I still think he's the king of the original one-line descriptive.

The Long Goodbye, priceless dialouge and growingly complex plot, Philip Marlowe's pain and moral code is in full bloom. The book is always better than the movie and this kind of work you wanna read in a few long sittings otherwise, as with me, you lose track of what happened. A story portraied through the haze of a lonely man.

Excellent--

After reading six Chandler novels to date, I can conclude that he is awesome. In my humble opinion, his performance first peaks at Farewell My Lovely - which I think is an even better work than The Big Sleep - slumps with The High Window and The Lady in the Lake, and then recovers to the same height with The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye. I didn't bother to read Playback in this collection for reasons of circumspection based on other reviews, but I thoroughly enjoyed his hardboiled style with snappy dialogue and breakneck pace the stories unfold (with the exception of The Long Goodbye, which compensates for its meandering slowness by its sheer realism and character development rare in detective stories).

His prose, especially in The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye is simply elegant, and his dialogue superb in its liveliness and wit. I've learned so much from his style and I'm glad I immersed myself in Chandler's works.

For anyone unfamiliar with Chandler, read his absolute bests first: Farewell My Lovely and The Little Sister, and if you like it, proceed with The Big Sleep and Long Goodbye.

Enjoy the epitome of the hardboiled style.

_______________

Read June 2010: Playback and Double Indemnity

Playback, the last of Marlowe books, is actually not bad. Marlowe is perhaps jaded and don't give a fuck about anything - which I liked - and gets into these messed-up romantic relationships - which is signature Marlowe. One bit that was slightly different was the ending where Linda Loring from The Long Goodbye calls him up and asks him to marry her. All in all, an enjoyable read.

The screenplay for James M. Cain's Double Indemnity is definitely enjoyable. The awesome bantering between Walter and Phyllis is definitely Chandler's. Good stuff.

Who knew that I would develop such a Raymond Chandler obsession through my reading for the Vintage Mystery Challenge? I tend to read British mysteries more often and I almost never read anything set in LA but here I am, still going. And I'll probably add extras on to my list, since I have the Library of America collection of his later novels checked out from the library right now.

Anyway, I enjoyed The Lady in the Lake because it took Marlowe out of the city a bit and had a more appealing member of law enforcement--Sheriff Jim Patton. He put up with Marlowe breaking into a suspect's house very well and didn't seem so bitter against private eyes. Maybe it had something to do with his age and his rural location. He even had a card on his car that said, "Voters, Attention! Keep Jim Patton Constable. He is too old to go to work." But he still proved to be a surprisingly good shot. Add to this the twisted plot that I thought I had an early insight into and then it seemed to be wrong but then turned out to be true but twisted way worse than I imagined--great stuff.

The Little Sister was a little tougher. Marlowe seems to have reached his low point in this novel--several times he says to himself, "You're not human tonight, Marlowe." He appears to be done with LA--he describes how he used to like it, before it became a "neon-lighted slum." Also, "Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood--and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else." I wonder what he would think of it today--is it just more of the same?

I found it interesting that the female character he seemed closest to in this novel wasn't the girl next door type this time but the hard, desperate, blonde movie star. One character even hinted that he was in love with her but it's so hard to tell with Marlowe--maybe that's why I keep reading more!

Chandler is a good go-to when youre between books.

En realidad leí Si no late de Hernán Lasque pero como goodreads no lo tiene este es el que salta en su lugar :(

This is going to have to be a five-in-one review for (i) The Lady in the Lake; (ii) The Little Sister; (iii) The Long Goodbye; (iv) Playback and perhaps some of the essays in this collection. I loved how this volume I picked up at the library is one of those navy blue cloth-bound Library of America editions. And I suppose that there's an inscription just inside the cover that reads "With the friendship of the people of the United States of America, US Embassy Singapore" signifies Chandler's standing in the American literary pantheon.

It's been a while since I've read a mystery novel and I believe it's my first time reading an American mystery novel at that. My earlier encounters with the genre were limited to Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle and GK Chesterton. Philip Marlowe is quite a stark difference from Poirot, Holmes and (definitely) Miss Marple, to say the least. Your stereotypical hard-boiled American detective, portrayed in countless Hollywood productions with his square jaw, dark (but slightly battered) good looks, cigarette, battered Homburg and hard drinking ways. But the Lady in the Lake was fantastic. Gripping plot, good pacing and characterisation - going through the 200 pages was a breeze. 4 stars for this novel.

The Little Sister was 16 pages longer than the Lady in the Lake but it felt like 160. A friend had earlier commented that the Lady in the Lake had "a new, exciting piece of information at the end of every chapter, but he is constantly misdirecting you so that even if you did guess the ending, he's pushed so many different alternatives in front of you, tantalizingly, that you still feel like the reveal is a true revelation." I felt with the Little Sister, Chandler took this technique - which worked so well in the Lady in the Lake - to the extreme; he wove so many threads, threw in so many sub-plots and random bits of information that the plot (if you could call that loosely constructed morass a plot) unravelled into sheer pandemonium. Too much going on at the same time. Closer to the complexities of real life? Perhaps. But what's the point/fun in that? I also wanted to stab Orfamay Quest if Marlowe didn't get round to it first. 2 stars at most for this novel.

Thankfully, Chandler bounced back in the Long Goodbye, which clocked in at a whopping 317 pages. In this novel, Marlowe is embroiled in the mystery of Terry Lennox, a down-and-out man he befriends and is suspected of brutally murdering his rich wife Sylvia Potter before escaping to Mexico (with Marlowe's help) and committing suicide. Marlowe is also hired by the beautiful Eileen Wade to keep an eye on her unstable writer husband Roger. Naturally, the two stories are connected but how? 3 stars for this one.

The final novel in the collection - Playback - provides a fairly strong finish. In Playback, Marlowe is hired to follow Eleanor King/Betty Mayfield who is apparently trying to escape something in her past. Along the way, a dead body surfaces and Marlowe finds himself embroiled in yet another mystery. 3 stars for this one. [Spoiler alert:] What sets Playback apart from the other novels in the collection is that for once, there is there is no ex-husband involved in the murder.

Four late novels, a screenplay, and selected essays and letters by the master of noir detective fiction.

Chandler establishes the bar that all other hard boiled mystery writers must meet.

I'd read all of them before, of course, but had to pick up this collected edition.

The second volume in the Library of America's Raymond Chandler collection contains the last 4 Philip Marlowe novels, the screen play for the movie "Double Indemnity", as well as essays like "The Simple Art of Murder" and selected letters.

The novels are "The Lady In the Lake", "The Little Sister", "The Long Goodbye" and "Playback". Of these, "The Long Goodbye" is not only a great story but also great literature. Philip Marlowe is his most human, and his decision to help out a friend in need leads to unexpected consequences.

1) The Lady in The Lake - Philip Marlowe ventures into the mountains, far from the city and finds more mystery than he bargained for. / My Take: This one surprised me a little bit. Loved the small town sheriff in it.

2) The Little Sister - Mousy little Orfamay Quest (Wow! What a name!) from Kansas wants to find her brother, Orrin. He's disappeared into Bay City (a nasty, corrupt place in Marlowe's world). Could he be the infamous ice pick murderer or is he being stalked by the real murderer?

3)The Long Goodbye - Marlowe sticks his neck way out for a friend. Will he get it back without needing too many repairs, both physically, emotionally and professionally? Is a $5,000 bill enough payment for this mess? / A cautionary tale, for sure!

4) Playback - Marlowe is hired to tail a woman who is fleeing, from what or whom we are not told, nor is Marlowe. That gets him and us sore enough to quit. But when he sees her being strong-armed by an unknown party he knows he has to help her somehow. Will he help her out of or into more trouble, or is he being played? / The dame is nuttier than a PayDay candy bar. But Marlowe doesn't seem to have anything better to do, so he dives into this adventure. He gets his full share out of it.

5) Double Indemnity - What can make a good insurance salesman go off the rails? Maybe just a glimpse of an ankle bracelet on a desirable ankle. / It rings all too true.

6) Among the essays, I particularly liked "Writers in Hollywood" (Atlantic (magazine), November 1945). It goes over why Hollywood is as it is and how it should be but can't quite be.