A fascinating slice of Chandler. four short stories drawn from the early pulps, my favorite being "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (most of these stories,unlike his later novels,are written in the third person and even though Marlowe never appears you can easily see the early influence and shape of things to come) but the real highlight is the title essay where Chandler takes apart most of the classic detective stories and offers a critique of crime fiction.

Overall, I liked it. It was worth reading if only for Chandler's essay of the same title of this collection of short stories published by the Atlantic in 1950. It appears at the beginning of this book.

I am fan of this style of writing. Some may call it pulp fiction. Perhaps, hard-boiled? I suppose it is similar to comparing bare knuckle fighting and boxing under the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Chandler's style, and those like him, is down and dirty, and supposed to be realistic. Indeed, in his essay, he writes: "Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic." He was writing in the context of denigrating the old-fashioned British-style mystery. I do believe he had a point.

These short stories are, I guess, realistic of the time and place they were set in: 1930's Los Angeles. Reading them now in 2020, they are a microcosm of society and its attitudes in those times. His stereotyping of black and Asian people is something that would not be tolerated today, and rightly so. But if the reader can get past all that, these are stories that bring to mind old black and white movies full of characters wearing hats and mink fur coats (men and women), smoking cigarettes, slurping hard liquor, and of course toting guns or should I say "gats."

They were all okay but no more than that. They tended to become a bit tiresome in that they covered the same types of characters but different names, and slightly different story. However, I am looking forward to reading The Big Sleep to see how he writes in a full length novel. I also vaguely recall seeing the movie so many years ago.

I pose an interesting question about Chandler and his "realistic" style. I really do wonder just how "realistic" his dialogue was. Did folks really talk like that back then? Or is it yet another case of life imitating art found in books and movies?

I mean, how would Chandler really know how tough guys and their molls talked? He became a detective fiction writer at the age of 44 after losing his job as an oil company executive. Prior to that as a British-American, he was a British civil servant then fought in WW1 with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, before undergoing flight training in the fledgling Royal Air Force (RAF) when the war ended. In 1919 he returned to America and by 1931 Chandler was a highly paid vice president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate.

Food for thought??

Gelesen in den 2000ern

This collection of hard-boiled short stories from various pulp magazines begins with Chandler's excellent essay of the same name and continues with stories that, while not always masterful, show not only the author's craft, but also his willingness to experiment stylistically and structurally, even when the plot itself is nothing special. I singled out Spanish Blood, The King in Yellow, Pearls Are a Nuisance and Guns at Cyrano's as the best short stories of the collection.

The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler

I'm not usually a fan of short story collections, preferring instead, something i can immerse myself in. Still i wanted to read this collection of 7 short stories by Raymond Chandler, partly because i adore Chandler's prose, but also because i wanted to see how he had arrived at the Marlowe character. Marlowe doesn't feature in any of these stories, though he seems to lurk around every corner.

The sense i got from these stories, is that Chandler was trying out a number of characters & the sum of these & a number of other shorts printed in Black Mask Magazine, provided him with the character who would eventually morph into Phillip Marlowe.

If you read this collection & you have read several of the Marlowe novels, you will notice several similarities to scenarios in the Marlowe oeuvre. It is well known Chandler cannibalized his short stories & cobbled them together for the Marlowe novels. There is, for instance, one story where a set of pearls are stolen. Reminiscent of the emerald theft in 'Farewell, My Lovely'. This in no way diminished my enjoyment of this collection. It's what i was expecting & in a way, i was gratified to find my expectations realized.

There is, if anything, a little more wry humor in the shorts than found in the Marlowe novels. There is the same attention to detail we expect from Chandler, lending a cinematic feel to these stories, as indeed do the Marlowe novels. By the second story, i realized this collection would make an excellent movie in itself. Maybe not all 7 stories, but several of them at least. A number of vaguely connected vignettes. Not with the same actors, but with common minor roles; a newsboy on a corner; a beat cop, swinging his truncheon; a hot-dog vendor; a stuttering neon sign over a bar. There's something about Chandler's prose that makes me think of these things. I think it is the attention to detail. He does it so effortlessly. With any other writer it might be annoying, but Chandler pulls it off with aplomb. The fact he is writing in his own era helps. There's an authenticity to his stories that is really wonderful. A window into a distant past, not possible to duplicate today, when all we have is hindsight, our own era & the ability to look to the future.

This book is worth reading for Chandler's introduction at the beginning of the book alone. Here's an extract from the end of his introduction:

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honorable instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."

For anyone who has not read Raymond Chandler, this is an ideal introduction. And for those familiar with his work, but perhaps not so familiar with his short stories, the same applies. For anyone else i've not mentioned, just talk amongst yourselves.

Here is a list of the stories in this collection:

Spanish Blood
I'll Be Waiting
The King in Yellow
Pearls Are a Nuisance
Pickup on Noon Street
Smart-Aleck Kill
Guns at Cyrano's
Nevada Gas

It's 5 stars from me. Good reading!

The book begins with Chandler's Atlantic Monthly essay about detective novels which is followed by eight short stories. In the essay, he discussed the difficulty in creating a good detective story given that they tend to be about murder and given that there are so many such stories out there. They have to draw you in to an unfortunate situation and offer enough facts without error to keep you interested. He discussed Hammett as the master of this because of the style he introduced and his carefully revealed details. He failed to mention that he himself was also a master.

Of the eight stories, half of them worked better than the others. The weaker ones packed a little too much into them while the others were better paced. In Pearls are a Nuisance, a completely different writing style was used. This story was not typical Chandler dialog or characters. It actually seemed more like reading Wodehouse with a dapper protagonist and a silliness to a lot of the conversations which I enjoyed a lot.

Sparse as Hemingway. Violent as Tarantino. Add a dash of racist language and go heavy on the helpless dames. Shoot. Rinse. Repeat.

8 stories cut from the same square-jawed mold of Los Angeles crime fiction. This is early Chandler taking advantage of a template where hard guys casually stand between the law and the criminals; where our private dick teases a femme-fatale and even gets a bruised-lip kiss in; gets roughed up by meathead marauders and slick-palmed degenerates; engages in gunfire usually with the head thug standing by a regal desk or a lush davenport; gets tossed in the backseat of cars for a heavy-knuckled joy ride; finds a stiff sitting in a chair or under a bed, a bullet hole and a miserable clue side by side; goes to a cottage hideout and finds the fink who talks like a canary and gives up multiple plot points....and so on. It is really not the plot that transcends here, but the writing. And the highlights are "I'll be Waiting", actually the most melancholic of the bunch; "Pearls are a Nuisance" for its forked-tongued sense of humor, kind of like a buddy movie with two protagonists on the opposite ends of the social ladder; and "Guns at Cyranos" for its portrayal of a sad boxer unwilling to take a fall. All of this is earmarked with Chandler's essay "The Simple Art of Murder" which isn't all it's hyped up to be. Overall, though, a stellar collection that shows how sharp and witty he was (nobody could describe a face like Chandler) before he put Marlowe to the page in 1939's "The Big Sleep."

Came for the name on the cover, a love for hard-boiled fiction and a soft spot for Philip Marlowe, and curiosity. Stayed for all of that. Even without Marlowe, the ride is still pretty good with Chandler. His short stories leave savory hints of the characters he may have worked with (mostly gritty types with reluctant but good hearts) if he had explored his options a bit more and not stopped at writing full-length novels of just Marlowe. The characters are quite indistinguishable (their names are easily forgotten, but there are many stories) but the style was familiar - and therefore, fun. Some evidence of Chandler's critical smarts available in the essay that shares the book's title. It is impressive to watch him poke holes into classic English detective stories from A.A. Milne and Dorothy Sayers.

Read this book primarily for the essay of the same title included in this collection, which by itself is sufficient reason to pick up this book.

A good little collection of dark LA streets and seedy characters! A perfect read for a crisp spring weekend!

All fours short stories in this book are gems, but the most valuable bit is the title essay Chandler writes. It's a perfect breakdown of his work, how he approaches it and the detective story genre as a whole. Anyone who loves the detective story as a fan or as a writer should read it.