Scan barcode
ehlupton's review
5.0
[a:Raymond Chandler|1377|Raymond Chandler|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1206535318p2/1377.jpg] 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.
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.
More...