Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The High Window (1942).
Mon, May 26, 2025./noise/books | LinkKindle. Inevitable after chewing through Dashiell Hammett's collected works and rewatching The Long Goodbye (1973). (I have yet to get to the novel for that; it's from 1953.)
Well, what can I say. He started strong with loads of similes and humour (c.f. Sarah Miles as a jazz weekend in The Big Sleep (1975)) but by the third book the rewards are diminished. All are structured like a collation of short stories; vast casts of characters with some overlaps, abundant scenic description, gnarly plots and not exactly satisfying conclusions. (I'm not here for the whodunit aspect; it feels like important details are withheld but perhaps he's fair by the standards of that genre.) Perhaps they function as a snapshot of the Los Angeles/Santa Monica region at the time. It's helped along by the odd bit of abstruse colour, e.g. a reference to Moral Re-Armament which is topical now. Fun.
