The Lady in the Lake / The Little Sister / The Long Goodbye / Playback

“The Lady in the Lake” (1943)-

The clerk on duty was an egg headed man with no interest in me or anything else. He wore parts of a white linen suit and he yawned as he handed me the desk pen and looked off into the distance as if remembering his childhood-p. 77

“The Long Goodbye” is generally regarded as his best, but “Lady in the Lake” is my personal favorite. I initially read it in an inexpensive turning rack paperback edition. The cover pictured what looked like a log in a lake-it took a while for me to see the lady and I remember the pleasure I felt at the revelation and my pleasure at unraveling the picture. In the book, her arm comes up and breaks the surface of the water-just like in Malory! Holy smokes! Chandler’s dreams and pretensions come true. Don’t tell him, but it really is rather clever. Jim Patton, the Sheriff up at Little Fawn Lake, is a wonderful creation. I pictured Marlowe’s visits to Chris Lavery’s house as occurring in Manhattan Beach, California at that time I first read it, circa 1973. The solution to the mystery is both wildly improbable and wonderfully satisfying. I have begun, per Author Chandler’s instructions, to picture Marlowe as Cary Grant. It sounds crazy but it works. Grant is easy to picture in your mind’s eye and it explains Marlowe’s otherwise unexplainable success with women; and irony comes so easily to them both. Their speech rhythms are very similar at times. After all these years I still enjoy the landlady scene, heaven only knows why. Finale is abrupt and final. Lead up to the finale with the scarf business very good. Chandler depends on the reader to spot something illogical (first person narrator Marlowe does not explain himself to the reader) and thus be drawn into the story. Really strong book.
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“The Little Sister” (1949)-previously considered a throwaway, now reconsidered. The thwarted romanticism becomes bitterness and poor Merle of “High Window” morphs into Orfamay Quest. Competently constructed and pretty entertaining. Our hero does a minimum of soul searching.
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“The Long Goodbye “ (1953)-

That was a dream girl. Some of her was here and now, but a lot of her was there and then-Bernie Ohls, p 766

Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean-Eileen Wade, p 771.

The murderous disillusioned dream girl. Terry Lennox the false friend. The bad parts are really bad, the good parts are really good, and the whole thing is about lost illusions. The good parts are easy and true, the bad parts are clunky and fake. I guess I liked “Lady in the Lake” because it was more pulled together, very smooth, with no clunky parts-and maybe because it didn’t “aim high” and try to be a “real” novel. I don’t hold Author Chandler’s pretensions against him (I admire ambition) but I’m not taken in by them, either.

Domestic helper Candy rendition as god awful as might be expected. This dated racism stuff is embarrassing. The n-word and a little homophobia round things out. Jesus.

I’ll be blunt, I really don’t get why Marlowe is so mad at Terry. Because he didn’t take Phillip into his confidence? Because Marlowe wasn’t his rescuer, but that his rescuers were a couple of gangsters? The Marlowe nobility thing gets worn pretty thin here. You get tired of him refusing money (you think, “at least he has the $5,000” and then he gives THAT back) and his distain for Sylvia’s sexual activities is as tired as his racism. Much is made by the critics about Wade as a stand-in for Chandler; I don’t recall anyone comparing the disillusioned romantics, Eileen and Phillip.

It’s funny, as far as I can tell, the critics put Chandler up on a higher shelf than Hammett, but I don’t see it, mainly because the Hammett guys go about their business without sighing and looking into the distance and tripping over their shattered dreams. Interesting that Hammett actually served time for not naming names, but none of his novel heroes ever did. Maybe he didn’t think it was all that heroic.

Don’t get me wrong-Chandler is a superb writer-better than Hammett if it comes to that. I just find his world view beautifully expressed and unpersuasive.
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“Playback” (1958)- No, not his best and yes, a minor work. Anything from the sad American genius is a gift. Chandler died the year after publication. Oh, and Marlowe wouldn’t take any money in this one either. It’s almost creepy.

This is a must have if you love Raymond Chandler as much as I do. 4 finals Philips Marlowe novels. Here is my rating:
- Lady In The Lake 4⭐
- The Little Sister 4⭐
- The Long Goodbye 5⭐
Play Back 5⭐

Raymond Chandler is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy. Or at least my ownership of this is proof that someone loves me, because these are four of the best novels I've read all year.

Philip Marlowe, Chandler's detective, roams the streets of Los Angeles and environs, looking for clues, criminals, or someone to hit with a witty one-liner. He's tired, lonely, propelled forward by some impetus he doesn't reveal; what we see of him comes in bits and pieces: he's in his late thirties, not bad looking, plays chess, speaks Spanish, and smokes and drinks. He likes coffee in the morning, sandwiches for lunch, and blondes for dinner, and he works by his own moral code which makes seducing someone else's wife all right, but taking money for the wrong sort of case uncool. And did I mention he's funny?

The novels here are hardboiled noir in the sense of "no innocents, only suspects", but there's actually relatively little violence in them, at least compared to contemporary writers like John Burdett. The Lady in the Lake has four bodies, as does The Little Sister, and the other two have fewer. Marlowe takes his share of knocks, and Chandler handles the violence and his reaction to it realistically.

Chandler is often credited as being the one who raised detective fiction to a literary form (credited, I suppose, by literature snobs), but if he did so he did it entirely through his use of language. To give a brief example from the beginning of The Lady in the Lake:

"The sidewalk in front of [the Treloar Building:] had been built of black and white rubber blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart."

This style, clipped and clear eyed, has become known as Chandleresque, and rightly so. He plays out his genius slowly, keeping you hooked, waiting for the next good one liner.

This edition is nice, with a hard cover and a little bookmark, very handy if you're me and schlep everything everywhere. It also has an introduction by a guy named Tom Hiney which is worth skipping; Hiney seems mostly to want to apologize for the fact that this is GENRE FICTION and not LITERATURE and seems to have difficulty keeping straight the difference between Marlowe (fictional) and Chandler (real). But you and I, being more intelligent, don't need that sort of person to tell us what to think.

In summary, read this book, it will make you happy.

"Shut up," she said, between teeth so tight they grated. "Shut up, you slimy, blackmailing keyhole peeper."

"You don't need me," I said. "You don't need anybody. You're so God-damn smart you could talk your way out of a safe-deposit box. Okay. Go ahead and talk your way out. I won't stop you. Just don't make me listen to it. ..."

She didn't move or breathe when I reached the door, nor when I opened it. I don't know why. The stuff wasn't that good.

I went down the stairs and across the court and out of the front door, almost bumping into a slim dark-eyed man who was standing there lighting a cigarette.

"Excuse me," he said quietly, "I'm afraid I'm in your way."

I started to go around him, then I noticed that his lifted right hand held a key. I reached out and snapped it out of his hand for no reason at all. I looked at the number stamped on it. No. 14. Mavis Weld's apartment. I threw it off behind some bushes.

"You don't need that," I said. "The door isn't locked."

"Of course," he said. There was a peculiar smile on his face. "How stupid of me."

"Yeah," I said. "We're both stupid. Anybody's stupid that bothers with that tramp."

"I wouldn't quite say that," he answered quietly, his small sad eyes watching me without any particular expression.

"You don't have to," I said. "I just said it for you. I beg your pardon. I'll get your key." I went over behind the bushes, picked it up and handed it to him.

"Thank you very much," he said. "And by the way –" He stopped. I stopped. "I hope I don't interrupt an interesting quarrel," he said. "I should hate to do that. No?" He smiled. "Well, since Miss Weld is a friend in common, may I introduce myself. My name is Steelgrave. Haven't I seen you somewhere?"

"No you haven't seen me anywhere, Mr. Steelgrave," I said. "My name's Marlowe, Philip Marlowe. It's extremely unlikely that we've met. And, strange to relate, I never heard of you, Mr. Steelgrave. And I wouldn't give a damn, even if your name was Weepy Moyer." I never knew quite why I said that. There was nothing to make me say it, except that the name had been mentioned. A peculiar stillness came over his face. A peculiar fixed look in his silent black eyes. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at the tip, flicked a little ash off it, although there was no ash to flick off, looking down as he said: "Weepy Moyer? Peculiar name. I don't think I ever heard that. Is he somebody I should know?"

"Not unless you're unusually fond of ice picks," I said, and left him. I went on down the steps, crossed to my car, looked back before I got in. He was standing there looking down at me, the cigarette between his lips. From that distance I couldn't see whether there was any expression on his face. He didn't move or make any kind of gesture when I looked back at him. He didn't even turn away. He just stood there. I got in and drove off.

The Long Goodbye

Los Angeles, 1953. [Sound of harbor tug.] Marlowe meets a down and outer, has a hunch and befriends him, in a manner of speaking. The down and outer is the ex-husband of a debauched California heiress who turns up dead. Marlow drives fleeing husband to Tijuana etc. — just a glimpse of the opening.

It wasn’t made into a movie until 1973, with Elliot Gould, nevertheless I can hear Humphrey Bogart’s Marlowe voice from The Big Sleep as I read. Moreover I envision his various facial expressions and tics. Cinema of the mind.

Fun, dated, hokey, hard boiled language, but not too much of it. Extremely wry humor, very compact. It’s a nice break from the Pages from the Goncourt Journals.

Chandler shifts the moral high ground from one character to another and back again. This happens often with the police. So who is behind the eightball, who has the upper hand? Hardly a headline, I know.

It’s template genre stuff, don’t get me wrong. It’s formulaic, but it’s deftly done. Did you know that Toni Morrison was a great fan of detective stories? Read them by the score on her Kindle.

The discussion of jail In chapters 6 through 9 reminds me of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers — minus the homosex. Chandler’s one of the many writers who wouldn’t have existed if Ernest Hemingway had not a generation before shown them the way.

“A lovely dish and no mistake.” (p. 564)
This is just one of those unfortunate dated metaphors for a beautiful woman. Is she meant to be consumed? Obliterated. And then what? So not all of the dated language is fun, some makes me cringe.

There’s too much dialogue. Dialogue is Chandler‘s Get Out of Jail Free card. As long as it’s cute he can say anything. Almost all the plot is spoken. All the narrator has to do is acerbicly dish out morsels of plot and he feels that’s enough. It isnt.

Masterworks.

"The Lady in the Lake" and "The Little Sister" behind me. What is there to say about Raymond Chandler? I used to be a Hammett man. Didn't think Chandler held a candle to him. I was so, so wrong. So wrong. Just started "The Long Goodbye", and expectations are high, not least because of the Altman/Gould film. "The Little Sister" floored me. It put me on the floor and stapled me to the floor and buried the floor and covered the buried floor in an ocean of floorage. I don't even know what so say except read "The Little Sister". Philip Marlowe is a knight, he's a goddamn knight. Stop what you're doing and read everything that Raymond Chandler wrote.

This is the second volume of a collection of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe mysteries, and it is superb reading. I love "LA Noir," and Chandler is arguably the father of this genre. Being an Angeleno, it is great fun reading about Marlowe visiting various locations from San Diego to Santa Barbara and knowing exactly where he is. While all of the novels in this collection are terrific, my favorite Chandler novel of them all is The Long Goodbye, and if you read that then you simply must read Playback for the twist at the end.

I would love to see some new film adaptations of these novels. Chandler is ever so adept at peering into the deep and dark recesses of human psychology. Great stuff!

This collection gets a solid 4 of 5 stars from me, and maybe 4.5 stars of 5 for The Long Goodbye.