I reviewed The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely separately, but as the library only had this omnibus available, I decided to read the whole thing. To start a couple of additional Chandler quotes that were too good not to share:

From Pearls are a Nuisance, p. 470 "Maybe you don't like tall girls with honey-colored hair and skin like the first strawberry peach the grocer sneaks out of the box for himself. If you don't, I'm sorry for you."

There was another quote from The High Window that I can't track down at the moment involving curtains puckering up like an old man that I will edit in if I find it again. Found it! The High Window, p.1003, "...and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping." I love it because I could never write like this in a million years! The description is incredible, and you just don't see writing like that very often anymore.

Anyway, this omnibus includes 13 of Chandlers stories that were published in various Detective Mags as well as three of his novels, The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and The High Window.

I found all three novels to be very entertaining, as I really enjoy Philip Marlowe. I am going to have to try to track down the film version of The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe, as I suspect that would be worth watching.

The first few stories I found to be rushed and unsatisfying, but I really enjoyed Red Wind, The King in Yellow, Pearls are a Nuisance, Trouble is My Business, and I'll Be Waiting.

At the end of the omnibus is a Chronology of Chandler's life and works which I found interesting as well. Recommend this volume if you are a fan.

I only read the "Farwell My Lovely" story as this month's book club selection. While I liked the descriptions of this author, I really didn't enjoy this story. I found it really difficult to stay focused on what was going on and with who during the entire book. I definitely wouldn't have chosen it as a book that I would have pulled off a shelf as something I wanted to read.

The Philip Marlowe stories hide an incredible emotional intelligence in the guise of the hardboiled detective mystery. Marlowe wrestles with the issues of what it means to be a man in the post industrial landscape of the west like no other character in fiction. When I finished reading them all I was so strung out I actually wrote one just to stay in that world. Hey, it's not too bad! It's called The Black Lotus. Ask me and I'll send it to you.

In my first round of reading Chandler (I had read The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye before starting this collection) I was most impressed by the language and the world-weary cynicism. This time, while I still loved those things, I also came to appreciate the nature of Chandler's detectives, especially Marlowe.

Unlike a lot of detectives, especially serialized detectives, Marlowe isn't that smart. He'll tell you so, repeatedly. Instead, Marlowe is a great detective because he's dogged and unbiased. Many times Marlowe comes to the true explanation because he rejects false explanations that others accept because they're easier or more convenient. This reflects the corruption that afflicts so many institutions in Chander's work. It's not that Marlowe is a better order of human being, but that he's not tied to the same structures as the cops and gangsters that surround him. He's a free agent.

I will return to this soon. For now I've read The Big Sleep and it was excellent. This was my first Chandler, I'm certainly a fan now!

Very much like Dashiell Hammett.

The High Window begins much as The Big Sleep does. Marlowe is summoned to a large house where he meets a wealthy, elderly invalid. The invalid asks Marlowe to tidy up some dirty family laundry. While cleaning the soiled garment, Marlowe discovers it is larger and splattered with more stains than he thought at first. It is large enough, in fact, to cover up secrets that by the time Marlowe stumbles on them are eight years old. By this time you have likely guessed the dirty garment is a sheet covering several dead bodies.

I'd rate The High Window as one of Chandler's lesser novels. It's not bad by any means. I just didn't find the plot, about a rare coin that has gone missing, all that involving. The ending, in which Marlowe lets several people get away with murder, didn't seem quite right. But Marlowe often stands back and refrains from intervening if he feels that's the proper course of action. Chandler affirms that trait several times in his novels. So it isn't inappropriate to his hero. I just think it's not handled properly here.

The book certainly has its charms, though. Chief among them are Chandler's gifts as a writer. This one contains one of the greatest sentences he ever wrote. Having snuck into the house where the former roommate of his client's missing daughter-in-law lives, Marlowe walks towards the pool where she is sunbathing. As he approaches, he sees her in the distance and describes her this way: "From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away" (1018). That is a sentence any writer would kill for. There's also a funny running gag about Marlowe's interactions with a lawn jockey standing by the front door of his client's house. Marlowe's exasperation and the way he expresses it to the lawn jockey made me laugh. At one point Marlowe tells the lawn jockey that it's the only sane person in the household. By the time the story wraps up, the reader is inclined to agree.

I mentioned earlier that Marlowe lets the murderer get away with it. He tells the killer he won't turn him in because he's not a cop and wasn't hired to find a murderer, not to mention he has no way of proving false the killer's assertion that it was an accident. But the real reason he stays out of it is that if he does bring in the police, it will destroy his chances of helping the one person in the case who deserves it. His silence is the price he pays to rescue the damsel in distress. One of his acquaintances describes him in this novel as a "shop-soiled Galahad" (1168). That's been part of Marlowe's reputation ever since, the knight errant private dick. It's a guise he'd wear again, most notably in The Little Sister, in which he again must remain silent to protect the one character in the story who is a decent person.

Sir Philip Marlowe, knight errant, is still as witty and erudite as ever. When he learns the name of a dog that has just barreled into him is Heathcliff, he asks if the name comes from Wuthering Heights, a query which elicits contemptuous befuddlement (1016). Later, when a cop tells him that one of the murder victims kept a notebook in which he wrote with a distinctive style of printing, Marlowe remarks, "Like Pepys' shorthand" (1077). The cop has no idea what Marlowe is talking about. They usually don't.


Posted 2 April 2015

"This is gun, buddy. It goes boom-boom, and guys fall down. Want to try it?" (p. 11)

Just writing this review for the Pulp Stories section as I'm entering the novels from this volume independently. These are quite fun. Similar, of course, to Hammett but I prefer Chandler's touch. There are the same issues-of-the-age here, again with the depiction of women and anyone who is not white, but it seems to me that Chandler is less troubling to read. My two favourites from this batch are the two which push farthest out from the centre of the genre: Pearls Are a Nuisance and I'll Be Waiting.

This review refers to the novel "The Big Sleep".
This is Raymond Chandler's first novel featuring the private eye Philip Marlowe and my second outing with the tall, no nonsense shamus ("Lady in the Lake" being the 1st).
I had been warned of the convoluted structure of the first half of the book so I paid close attention to the characters and was glad I did.
The story is entertaining and had an adequate amount of mystery in it right up to the conclusion. I have the Chandler 2 book set from LOA so more Marlowe will be in the offing.

Not shown; another half-star. At 1,200 pages, this is a big ol' seething hunk of mystery-slash-crime fiction that starts with 13 Pulp Stories from the 30s--featured in "Black Mask," "Detective Fiction Weekly" and "Dime Detective." 600 pages, if you're counting. Three of Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novels follow in the next 600; "The Big Sleep," (1939 U.S.) "Fairwell, My Lovely," (1940) and "The High Window," (1942). The novels, herein, are reviewed separately. The noir formula is patently rooted in the seedier elements of pre-war Los Angeles, being transported as the case unfolds to gated luxury mansions of the privileged and private--but morally-bankrupt--rich attended to by complicit house staff, chauffeurs and bodyguards. Each story is derelict and dirty and dangerous enough in its own peculiar brand of rawness to delight the pulp-crime aficionado who, like a moth to the flame, is drawn to a protagonist whose ragged street lingo frames the all-too-familiar set-ups of a day and night and day of the life of a private detective; a smart dick, his whiskey-soaked hunches (rarely shared with the police earning their well-deserved toxic contempt) usually resulting in gun play, serial interludes with thugs and/or cagey, two-timing, leggy, violet-eyed dames (see also: frail), picked locks and stumbling onto stiffs, then getting sapped blindly from behind only to be shuttled to an abandoned hide-away in the desert foothills. Or, where ever. The landscape, architecture, furnishings and even each player's features and fashion and foibles, are noteworthy in every detail. For these, the similarities of fixes and plays--of murders, frame-ups, kidnapping, blackmail plots, the usual tough-guy scenarios--though repetitious, are easily overlooked. Cigarettes, whiskey, guns (see also: rods), fists, saps and dead bodies (curiously, fresh kills more frequently than not) are always at center stage. A sort of glue, as props go, that binds one shifting scene to the next. Quotes? Another trinket that Chandler will lay on you. Too numerous to mention here but well-worth Google-beagling if you care to flush them from the background. All of which amounts to this collection being--cover-to-cover--a national treasure. The hallmark of a dark genius that captured eyeballs even before the paperback was invented. Save yourself some serious couch time and unplug the television. As a post-script, Chandler in print became a sought-after brand whose style lended itself well-enough to screenplays (his first being nominated for an Academy Award) but the experience put him off with so much distaste for the industry of movie-making, and the soul-crushing frustration of having to deal with Hollywood moguls (hacks), that he composed the harshest screed toward it all to ever appear in print in "The Atlantic" in 1945. It's titled "Writers in Hollywood." Harshing in the extreme. As an unstinting look (albeit a jaded and a cathartic one) behind the scenes, it's highy relatable to anyone who's ever had to submit creatively to handlers not worthy of respect with their other self-serving agendas. And, no doubt, just as relevant today--to the mindless glam and glitz of Hollywood--as ever. Kill shot. 22-caliber rimfire, long rifle, right to the heart. But we all know Hollywood does not, and never did, have one.

Chandler has become one of my favorite writers. I mostly wanted this book for the collected short stories, but I loved the three novels too. Yes, there is some unfortunate and dated racial and gender terminology, but it was easier for me to overlook it than with plenty of other authors of the era. The prose is taut and fun and Marlowe is one of the great anti-heroes of all time.

Back in the late 1980's I found a copy of Raymond Chandler's "The High Window" in my grandparents collection and read it. "The High Window" is a novel about private detective Philip Marlowe, and I was hooked. I later found that his works were included in the Library of America collection, and bought both volumes.

This volume includes all of Chandlers's pulp stories, and the first three Philip Marlowe novels: The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely (my favorite) and The High Window. The protagonists in the pulp stories have different names...Mallory, DeRuse, Sam Delaguerra, Johnny Dalmas, but they all share to some extent the characteristics of Philip Marlowe. Tough yet tender, cynical and romantic, dedicated to doing their jobs and with a code.

The Marlowe novels at their best are not just detective mystery stories; they're literature about the best and worst in human beings. The writing is remarkable, is a joy to read and should be read out loud.