I read 2 of the 4 novels: The Lady in the Lake and The Long Goodbye. I think these are the 2 popular ones, and I wanted to just get a taste of Raymond Chandler.

I didn't identify too much with the time period (LA in the 50s) or the main character, but the unexpected twists and turns in the mystery were entertaining.

The great American stylist. Essential.

I'm about halfway through this collection. Still have to read The Long Goodbye and Playback.

I don't often read genre fiction but when I was kid, it was all I read, especially the detective kind.

Chandler's awesome. Of course. Just finished the first novel in this collection, "The Lady in the Lake." Talk about thrust! It literally reached out, grabbed me, and pulled me through through the book to the final page in about three days: one day reading about 20 pages; the next, 80 pages; the next, 120 pages. And if I wasn't so busy, you can bet I would finished this in one day.

The style is very quotable. My favorite line(s): "Police business is a hell of a problem. It's a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get--and we get things like this."

And his plotting is masterful. Not only is there 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.


"The Little Sister" is also quite good, although I was scratching my head a little at the end. The action slowed down towards the end and then you were getting explanations for things you didn't even think needed explaining. And yet, what is better: everything tied up perfectly or a little confusion, a little ambiguity? The latter is certainly closer to the world. One interesting thing about the book is that it has many characters who act and have their own agenda--most of the time, there are only a few who do this and the rest just fill in the plot points. This is probably why the plot is so tangled at the end: when you have so many different threads going their own way, it's hard to weave a cloth with a coherent pattern.

Update: Finished "The Long Goodbye." Very interesting read considering I had seen the movie two years ago. Once you know who killed whom, then you're looking more carefully at characters when they first make their appearances. It's striking, however, how much Leigh Brackett changed in her script for Altman's movie. Very different story, particularly the ending--and she even added a whole new subplot. I think Brackett's conclusion is more satisfying than the book's but the novel, as a whole, is more enjoyable than the movie. That's because it feels like Chandler filled the story with so much personal material. His jabs at the publishing industry, the movie industry, the newspaper industry, and law enforcement feel sharp and authentic, with details not found in Hollywood, allowing the reader inside access to the corruption running rampant. The social commentary is really a good half of the book and makes the read more sophisticated than the average detective novel. And that's why it's almost disappointing that Chandler ends the book with the usual bit of the private eye explaining everything to everybody. It's funny how Chandler transcended quite a number of genre elements but still couldn't truly break the mold. But maybe that's all for the best--it's still a wild, wonderful ride.

If you have no Chandler, this collection is a must-own -- the first and third novels here are among the best he's ever done.

All great stories, but I lost some of the awesomeness by bingeing and reading all of them at once. The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely are two of his best ones. The Long Goodbye is also in the top three, but it's a different structure, with more autobiographical elements.

Chandler's top theme is always that the corrupt rich can buy protection, while the lower classes get the punishment.

Knopf is the name associated with "Black Mask" stories and hardboiled genre, so it is perhaps suitable that Chandler's greatest stories have been published so handsomely by Knopf, that beats even the "Library of America" version in its elegance & strength. The novels themselves are almost gold-standards of hardboiled or mystery fiction, and should be considered as great pieces of literature on their own. Highly recommended.

I reviewed two of the books in this anthology under their own titles, "The Lady in the Lake" and "Playback".

One knows that this curious connection to Mr Chandler through his writing does absolutely nothing to challenge or improve her character, and yet , discovering him has been so immensely satisfying.