I could not set this book down.

One of the many gems of dialogue:

"Alcohol is like love," he said. "The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off."
"Is that bad?" I asked him.
"It's excitement of a high order, but it's an impure emotion-- impure in the aesthetic sense. I'm not sneering at sex. It's necessary and it doesn't have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it."

(Come to think of it, Stephin Merritt also compares love to a bottle of gin. The analogy must be valid.)

How is this book so good? How did someone like Raymond Chandler walk the earth and type out this masterpiece? After reading this book I am more convinced than ever that I must read every Philip Marlow mystery in existence.

On the edition that I was reading (Everyman's Library) there is photograph of the author on the cover that's just great. He's on old man sitting on a couch at a cocktail party. He's wearing horn-rimmed glasses and holding a highball. On his left is a young lady in a silky dress smoking a cigarette in a cigarette holder. Yes. Yes! That's it! I want to be like that in forty years. I want to write a dozen brilliant books, then sit on a couch next to a beautiful woman at a cocktail party and wear horn-rimmed glasses. Ah. That's the life.

Promises what it says, really. A very long, unevenly written tale about a private eye who helps out a polite, gentle alcoholic after a chance encounter outside a club. A murder happens, then a suicide, but through a long and meandering chain of events, the detective stays involved instead of bowing out, because of course he does; this is a novel.

I haven't read Chandler before, nor watched adaptations, and I was most impressed by the writing style. Brisk, acidic prose that spares no one, including himself.

"They had watching and waiting eyes, patient and careful eyes, cool disdainful eyes, cops’ eyes. They get them at the passing-out parade at the police school."

“'Sold it, darling? How do you mean?' She slid away from him along the seat but her voice slid away a lot farther than that."

Surprisingly for me, I soon grew uninterested in the supposed mystery, which essentially dies down for a good third of the book, and only picks up in the last third. There's a rush of events in the first quarter, then a lot of alcoholic binges, with trips back and forth to estates outside of L.A. The last 15% or so slowly wraps up the plot, first with another murder, a surprise denouement worthy of Hercule Poirot, another suicide, and then another couple of twisty consequences and follow-ups. Curiously, the case is 'wrapped-up' by the police at least twice, both times in error, although the reader isn't sure of this. Marlowe comes out with some surprise information at the very end that was not particularly alluded to earlier, nor did the reader have an inclination that his suspicion was heading that direction, especially as he continues making principled stands. It takes on the aspect of a magic trick rather than an organic series of events made clear.

That said, the prose was amazing.

"There’s nothing around here but one great big suntanned hangover."

Chandler also has a lot of opinions to work out,

about the law:

"The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer."

about decorators:

"The fellow who decorated that room was not a man to let colors scare him. He probably wore a pimento shirt, mulberry slacks, zebra shoes, and vermilion drawers with his initials on them in a nice Mandarin orange."

about writers:

"Maybe you always ought to ask a writer how the book is going. And then again maybe he gets damned tired of that question."

about rich people:

“There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks,” Ohls said. “Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees for beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn't, on account of it cut into their profits."

and about gambling:

"You think those palaces in Reno and Vegas are just for harmless fun? Nuts, they’re there for the little guy, the something-for-nothing sucker, the lad that stops off with his pay envelope in his pocket and loses the week-end grocery money. The rich gambler loses forty grand and laughs it off and comes back for more."

and the press:

"Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.”

I mean, honestly, I found it kind of fascinating to read modern sentiments from someone writing 70 years ago. I'm sure that says something profound, but you'll have to explain it to me.

Wikipedia and the like talk about how this is Chandler's favorite and most autobiographical novel. He apparently wrote it while his wife had a prolonged fatal illness, and his own mental health struggles seemed to be mirrored by the character Roger Wade. It adds interesting insight, to be sure, and it could very well explain why I felt the middle third of the book wasn't about a mystery at all, but about Wade's problems.

Overall, I'm definitely worth reading and likely rereadable for the prose, although I've heard The Big Sleep ranks up there as well. Note there is some weird racial descriptions about Mexicans, both in a town in Mexico and one in specific, but I think it largely passed a sniff test. Women fare about as well as you would expect from noir genre stereotypes. On the whole, re-readable, with caveats.