Lotta fun.

Chandler's work has much in common with the bigass Story Of America. Not any glossy, optimistic aspect, of course, but the deep and painful themes underneath. And the pageantry overhead is unexceptional, tedious, banal.

In Chandler's period-perfect mid-thirties works, we see a lot of the threadbare and the seedy, last night's makeup, and the smoke & liquor remnants of celebrations long concluded.

An eye for the telling detail sets each sorry tale in motion: the phone-booth in a chintzy hollywood drugstore, a tired cop's worn shoe-leather, a fleabag hotel in the negro part of town, the sirens at night ....

Occasionally, the investigator is drawn out of his natural milieu, and if so at the beginning, it's often enough to a ritzy estate of some newly-found clientele. If at the end of the story, though, it's often to a deserted house in a desolate canyon. Stars glide overhead in the night sky, and really big & powerful cars are parked outside. Here takes place the intermission, wherein heavy curtains generally obscure some blunt coup d'theatre, the blow that brings down unconsciousness, and our detective, like the interlude between acts in a grand drama. When he wakes up, the cards in the deck have usually been reshuffled, and all new threats are at hand.

Have to say I was reminded of the concerns of social drama, too-- there is more than a little of the Willie Loman character and his tormentors, in the equivocators of Chandler's floating world.

I really don't know what Chandler wants for a conclusion, if he does. His fiction is uniquely descriptive of the downside of the American equilibrium, as embodied by Los Angeles : giddy and oddly elliptical on the upswing, sinister and swirlingly diabolical on the way down.......

Love the pulp stories here; the heart and pulse of the novels is all there in the stories.

Read "The Big Sleep" for book group. Exellent. Also read the annotated editiion that was fascinating.

Philip Marlowe's not as hard-bitten, callous, and heartless as you may glean from the towering edifice of iconography that's grown up around him over the years. As written, he's actually a pretty nice guy, quiet and self-deprecating. Thinking back over the three Marlowe novels I've just read, I'm actually not even sure he shot anyone.

He's much more explicitly a hero in these books. In The High Window, Marlowe sticks with a case long after its no longer necessary; his actions in the last half of the novel have little to do with his job. He's motivated by the desire to figure out what's really going on, but also by the desire to help a clearly traumatized young woman escape a bad social situation and get back to her parents in Wichita. I found it rather touching, which isn't usually something you can say about noir fiction.

The dozen or so short stories that precede the novels are a good intro to Chandler's style. You also get to see Chandler tackle subjects and points of view he never touches in the novels: some protagonists are actually cops, for instance. "I'll Be Waiting" is probably the best of these, about a hotel detective who gets a warning from his mobster brother and has to decide how to react.

I was worried that reading so much Chandler at once would start to drag and become repetitive, but the stories are different enough that they pulled me along. And the prose, as many, many others have pointed out, is unique and hilarious and wonderful. There's a reason Chandler's at the top of the list for 20th century detective fiction.

This isn't actually the book I read, but it's the closest I could find depicted on Goodreads...Mine is a 1964 omnibus edition that contains The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The High Window, and The Lady in the Lake.

With that piece of housekeeping out of the way, I will proceed to reviewing...or rather, in this case, to reverential, rhapsodic rejoicing!

I read these stories 15 years ago and was so enamored that I tried to write my own version of a Phillip Marlowe entanglement set in the place and time I lived, Bellingham, WA of 1994. Let's just say that I did not find Chandler so easily imitable! Or perhaps he is just too inseparable from 1940s LA. Fifteen years pass, much has changed for me (less hubris?), I pick up the book again...and find myself in some sort of bliss that absolutely will not be analyzed.

The High Window might be the best. Chandler's intellectual and observational, multisensory familiarity with furniture, lawns and landscaping, building facades, ornamental architectural features, flowers, jewelry, clothing, and, most of all, faces and mannerisms, is displayed so casually, so economically, so comically and poignantly that you can just picture the man writing his novel in his head as he walked about all the neighborhoods of LA. There's hardly a sentence here that doesn't show his almost oddly apolitical and nonjudgmental, super-astute class consciousness. Chandler uses time beautifully; I think most of these stories happen in three days or so, but they feel elongated by the way he alternates dialogue (where most of the action, in the form of plot twists, occurs) with solitary moments of waiting, noticing, thinking out loud to the reader, and waiting some more...all in witticisms that continually delight.

But here I seem to be trying to analyze again, perhaps secretly wishing to transport Marlowe to Windsor, VT of 2009. What would he notice here and now? Who would offer him their secrets and their deceptions?

What have we lost, that Marlowe may have no work to do in this place and time?

Really liked The High Window. I would rank it below The Lady in the Lake, but above The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. Now I'm going to read some of the pulp stories that I had skipped over.

Thirteen Stories by Raymond Chandler. 1930s. The storeies are examples of pulp fiction - little character development or setting and lots of action. * - 10 guys shot in 50 pages. Pulp fiction grew into and became comic books.

The stories are interesting in that it shows where Chandler came from, but reduces his reputation as a major author for these stories are sub-par. His first story "Blackmaailers Don't Shoot" took five months for Chandler to write. The last two stories "Trouble is My Business" and "I'll be Waiting" had skill, maintained interest and left mark.

راستش وقتی طرح جلد کتاب و عنوانش را دیدم، با خودم گفتم این کتاب خوبی نیست. کتاب البته ترجمه خیلی خوبی داشت و شروع خوبی هم داشت. ولی کل داستان حکایت کش دار دو روز بود. آدمهای بی ربط و مزخرفی داشت و "راز" قصه هم آنقدرها چیز دندانگیری نبود. البته نقاط قوت زیادی هم داشت، من جمله شهر محل وقوع داستان که نماد یک اشرافیت "قلابی" بود؛ آدمهای تازه به دوران رسیده ای که زور می زدند برای خودشان کسی باشند. و شخصیت اول داستان هم تجسم واقعگرایی تلخی بود که در نهایت پوچی این بند و بساط ها را بر ملا می کرد. از دیگر نقاط قوت کتاب، دیالوگهای محشر و نفسگیرش بود (خصوصا دیالوگهایی که شخصیت اصلی با زنها داشت!). ولی از طرف دیگر، خیلی از توصیفات اضافی بود و برای فضاسازی، احتیاجی به همه آنها نبود. به نظر من نویسنده موفق شده بود درست حرفش را بزند و به دل هم می نشست. ولی در نهایت، تنها می توان گفت که این کتاب، بیانیه غرایی بود، ولی داستان جذابی نداشت.ا

Chandler's tough guy dialogue is perfection that only someone who is not really tough could write. The same story played out again and again, except it's not raining in these noir stories, it's in California and the sun beats down on the sweat pouring off the brow of some terrified mug and the dirty cop that's putting the screws to him over some dame who just walked out of a club. Best enjoyed in small doses, unlike the liquor that basically everyone in these stories consumes.

The Library of America's volume 1 of Raymond Chandler's work contains 13 short early pulp stories and the first three of his seven Marlowe novels. 

Pulp Stories:
Compared to the three novels in this volume, Chandler's short stories here (originally published in pulp magazines "Black Mask" and "Dime Detectives" in the late 1930s) have clearer plot-driven capers not as concerned with building complicated portraits of murky characters, but rely most heavily on some twists and turns, double-crosses, lucky scrapes, gangsters, gamblers, PIs, cops, boxing fixes, local political conspiracies, side alley confrontations, and the narrative POV style of his Marlowe novels but without, well, Marlowe.

My favorites here are "Nevada Gas," "Goldfish," "Red Wind," and the hilarious "Pearls are a Nuisance," which reads almost like a classic O'Henry blackmail caper, in which a pair of drunk buddies are out to recover a necklace of false pearls for the employer of one's fiance. Sandwiched towards the end of the sequence of 13 hardboiled and serious crime capers, "Pearls are a Nuisance" is a contrasting breath of fresh air and evidence of Chandler's range as a story-teller.

The Big Sleep:
The first in Raymond Chandler's classic noir series starring the 1930's-style LA private eye Phillip Marlowe, "The Big Sleep" (1939) begins when Marlowe is hired by a dying rich old man to track down a blackmailer and deal with him. The rich guy has two spoiled young daughters who have varying degrees of maturity and immorality and who might be connected to the blackmail.

"The Big Sleep" reads just like you would hear a pulp noir atmospheric detective story, great descriptions of the environment and character looks through Marlowe's POV, full paragraphs describing all these sneaky people with suspect motives and goals, Marlowe smartly holding his cards to the vest and seeing through deception. There are no fewer than four well-written femme fatale types who are all different and great with their own conflicting takes on morality and station that make sense. They and the mob guys, cops and jilted lovers have us guessing the whole time.

Verdict: A fun introduction to Phillip Marlowe; I'll be reading more of these. The mystery itself has some pacing issues and unresolved twists that don't track but Chandler's characters and dialogue are really fun here.

Jeff's Rating: 4 / 5 (Very Good)
movie rating if made into a movie: PG-13

Farewell, My Lovely:
"I filled a pipe and reached for the packet of paper matches. I lit the pipe carefully. She watched that with approval. Pipe smokers were solid men. She was going to be disappointed in me."

Detective Marlowe is minding his own business on a busy LA city street when he sees a monstrous white guy dressed to the nines toss a black guy out of a bar, asking about a girl. His curiosity stoked, Marlowe peeks in to see what's going on and the 6'5" monster grabs him and says Marlowe's going to help him find his girl; this wonderful character Moose Malloy ("they call me Moose Malloy, on account of I'm large") has spent eight years in prison and is now back looking for a pretty redhead named Velma where she used to work. After Moose knocks out the bouncer, shoots the proprietor and leaves, Marlowe is asked by a lazy cop to find the goon ... for free.

Marlowe then is hired by a fancy white guy to help him deliver a cash ransom to a mugger who stole his girlfriend's jewelry. Things go sideways and now Marlowe is involved in a second murder investigation.

Chandler's handling of underlying Depression-era racism and corruption in LA is smart in "Farewell, My Lovely" (1940), both with its dialogue and with the treatment of the two murders by its cops. The murder of the black bar owner by Moose gets a single, lazy cop to investigate who isn't interested in solving it. The murder of the white dandy gets a more capable detective and then a few more when they find there is a jewelry heist ring involved. Marlowe himself isn't beyond criticism here and he captures that flawed noir hardboiled mantle well.

And now let's talk about Miss Anne Riordan and Mrs. Helen Grayle. This is my second Chandler read and he seems to write his murky female side characters in a way that reminds me of how Alfred Hitchcock managed the blonde bombshells he had in his movies; they aren't props. Chandler introduces Riordan in the dead of night, a supposedly-innocent bystander who comes across Marlowe after a money-handoff gone wrong, describing her as a not-very-beautiful-but-quite-pretty anywoman. Mrs. Grayle is a more classic femme fatale who plays everyone just right and whom every guy falls for and who is obviously a central character in both murders, we just don't know if it is as a true button-pusher or as a circumstantial victim. 

Verdict: A great classic murder mystery with interesting characters, darker moments than you'd expect from a 1940 mystery, and its hard-boiled nuance and relatability hold up even today. I'm not ready to call "Farewell, My Lovely" the best crime novel I've ever read but it is in my top ten for now.

Jeff's Rating: 5 / 5 (Excellent)
movie rating if made into a movie: PG-13

The High Window:
Private Eye Phillip Marlowe is hired by a rich widow to recover a rare gold coin that she thinks was stolen by her good-for-nothing trollop of a daughter-in-law who has gone missing. Marlowe knows more is at play here and, despite his better judgement, finds himself navigating complicated storylines around family dynamics, blackmail, lies, and murder. 

Marlowe's place in American crime literature is well-earned, as is his role as a cynical and smart romantic knight holding truth and discretion as tools of justice in the urban jungle of 1940's Los Angeles. Where "High Window" (1942) falters is in the step-by-step progression, or lack thereof, of the investigation itself, which left me scratching my head more than a few times. Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to get this one without a study guide.

Verdict: A decent classic detective story but complicated as heck. Not the funnest read; I was rubbing my eyes a lot trying to figure out what was going on.

Jeff's Rating: 2 / 5 (Okay)
movie rating if made into a movie: PG

Averaging out the ratings, I'll put this collection at a 4/5

This was my first experience reading Chandler and I absolutely love his way with words. Reading the pulp stories was great and I enjoyed all three of the novels. However, 1177 pages of Chandler is a LOT of Chandler, no matter how enjoyable. By the last novel I was counting the pages until I finished. I would highly recommend reading this for the pulp stories and then reading the novels at a later date.

The book is a collection of brilliant short stories and his early novels. While all stories in the book were amazing, I personally found "The Big Sleep", one of the most well known his early novels as most interesting one. The book is about the search for the case of murder which had happened under the strange condition. As the story is known as its hardboiledness, the readers are able to see the story which is focused only on solving the case, but not depiction of emotion. Thus, I am sure all mystery fans can enjoy the attraction of this book fully.