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. Chandler 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 written in the first person by Philip Marlowe. (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.
