favourite line; it was raining again the next morning. a slanting grey
rain like a swung curtain of crystal beads.

"Dead men are heavier than broken dreams"

These stories are just excellent examples of classic detective fiction. The shorts were decent, but the loosely connected Marlowe novels were phenomenal. Chandler inserts so many wise guy asides and similes that I would read these books for those alone. You can see the archetype here for so many later detectives.

Love Chandler. Hard to review such a volume in one go, so just Farewell, My Lovely here. Always notable to me as an example of Hollywood title-changing, as probably the most notable film adaptation was retitled Murder, My Sweet because a survey of viewers thought the original title, Farewell, My Lovely, sounded too much like a musical. Dick Powell played Marlowe and was known for musicals.

Chandler was obsessed with titles and came up with lists of them presumably unattached to any particular plot, character or story. The same thing happened in Hollywood a few years ago. Maybe 2014-15? I guess that's a decade. Time accelerates as you age. For a brief moment, movies were getting greenlighted based on title alone. No script. No attachments. Only title. Titles are important. Chandler knew it.

Farewell, My Lovely is solid and engaging. Not my favorite, which are Big Sleep and Long Goodbye, which I haven't read recently. FML seems to have less similes? Chandler would also collect similes. "As much sex appeal as a turtle" "A face like a collapsed lung" Things like that. So not as many of these in FML maybe? But plenty of typical Chandler turns of phrase. Just really tight powerful evocative writing. "He looked too big. He had three inches on me and thirty pounds. But it was getting to be time for me to put my fist into somebody's teeth even if all I got for it was a wooden arm." I love this and don't know anyone who quite writes with this kind of wind up and landing. It's the cadence more than the language.

As far as the plot, it was typically convoluted. Maybe he was drunker than he should have been writing it. Or I wasn't as drunk as I needed to be reading it. I don't think a lot of people realize Chandler in later years drank like Bukowski. Not the same career. Or writing. But at least one habit in common. Yet the plot of FML was decent and more action-packed than I remember from past readings, with a terrific sequence on the low seas and even a scene that seemed somewhat reminiscent of a great sequence in French Connection II, where our protagonist is at the pharmaceutical mercy of forces beyond his ken. There's also a twist I won't ruin that prefigures in a way the twist of another famous Chandler novel he writes over a decade later. Which made me think of Chandler's "cannablization" (his term) of early short stories into some of his later novels. Despite the danger of stories becoming a patchwork, and a kind of cut and paste aspect to some of his method, Chandler always expertly makes each thing its own whole thing.

I like other novels of his better, but this one is an essential part of the timeline and not to be missed.

i only read "the big sleep" in this anthology. partly because my stack of books to read is starting to scare me with its menacing height, and partly because...well, "the big sleep" was just really, really good. suggestive and sly and suspenseful. no wonder this guy's stuff was tapped for cinema adaptation so often.

I'm finished but not in the sense of reading the entire book. I thought this would be a book I could really enjoy. The beginnings of the 20th century gum shoe mysteries. Give me perspective. I love mysteries and detectives. I read most of the Pulp Stories and half the Big Sleep. I liked the Big Sleep better than the Pulp Stories but overall, I just couldn’t get past the jargon of the 30’s and 40’s; most of the time I spent trying to decipher what they were talking about….which detracted from the story. The attitude towards women was in your face awful. These are supposed to be classics but they left me cold. Just wasn’t my cup of tea by a long shot. So I’m done.

Aaron loves this stuff...we are totally sharing everything so here I go...

Truly the master, one of my favourite authors. Nobody has ever captured 1930s-1940s southern California the way he has.

The novels are pure Chandler, but the pulp short stories- pretty bad. I do understand that he was learning his craft with these.

Everything else just sucks right now.

(Sorry, George Eliot.)

Love the way those detectives talk. LOVE those metaphors they sling around.
But could not keep all the bad guys (and gals) straight, except in "The Goldfish," which gets 5 stars.

Like most collections of short stories, some are better then others, but from a historical perspective it's interesting to see how Chandler developed his style in his early works before he really came into his own with the phillip Marlowe books.