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marginwalker's review
medium-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.25
This book made me realize that I really can get by on style alone when I’m reading. I never really expect the most clever mystery plotting from hardboiled PI stories because for me the appeal of noir is the style and themes. Chandler’s clever writing is just too fun to bask in. I think a lot of writing is criticized as being “clever” or “trying to be clever” but Raymond Chandler was a genuinely funny guy who knew how to write a one-liner. We see noir dialogue and narration parodied all the time but there really is something here that the parodies and copycats can’t touch. Of course, like any hardboiled novel of the time, there’s the occasional piece of misogyny or homophobia that smacks you in the face every few minutes.
I read this book with an app that sends me 15 minute excerpts every day and that felt like a nice pace at which to enjoy it, reading it in a serialized format. Marlowe is an interesting guy and his brief moments of vulnerability are interesting to witness. He gets beat up a lot less than usual in this one.
LOVE that there’s a character named “Linda Conquest” and that other characters point out how on-the-nose that is. There’s actually a lot of meta commentary in this book that’s so shamelessly self-indulgent I can’t even be mad about it:
"Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book."
"Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or I myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect."
I read this book with an app that sends me 15 minute excerpts every day and that felt like a nice pace at which to enjoy it, reading it in a serialized format. Marlowe is an interesting guy and his brief moments of vulnerability are interesting to witness. He gets beat up a lot less than usual in this one.
LOVE that there’s a character named “Linda Conquest” and that other characters point out how on-the-nose that is. There’s actually a lot of meta commentary in this book that’s so shamelessly self-indulgent I can’t even be mad about it:
"Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book."
"Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or I myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect."
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny and Racism
Minor: Alcoholism
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