Raymond Chandler : Stories and Early Novels : Pulp Stories / The Big Sleep / Farewell, My Lovely / The High Window (Library of America)

by Raymond Chandler

book data

238 ratings, 4.43 average rating, 22 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		54%
4		35%
3		8%
2		1%
1		0%

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published

October 1st 1995 by Library of America

binding

Hardcover, 1216 pages

isbn

1883011078 (isbn13: 9781883011079)

description

If you're looking for the perfect gift for yourself or some other lover of mysteries, this beautifully-made volume from the Library of America series ...more

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06/05/07

Platoeatssouls rated it:

(review of isbn 0375415025)

bookshelves: mystery, theboxmarkeddone

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: people who want to be happy

Raymond Chandler 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 lat...more Raymond Chandler 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.(less)

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02/24/09

W.H. Manville rated it:

Read in January, 1986

The Big Sleep

When Shakespeare wrote his plays in blank verse, he wasn't trying to high hat his customers. That's what they bought their tickets to hear. It was the commercial form of the day.
That was OK with WS.
Rejecting the notion that the fate of an artist is to starve, Shakespeare chose themes no less sensational than those which make our own Best Seller lists today -- murder, love, war, swordplay&duels, treachery, romance, double crossing and cross ...more The Big Sleep

When Shakespeare wrote his plays in blank verse, he wasn't trying to high hat his customers. That's what they bought their tickets to hear. It was the commercial form of the day.
That was OK with WS.
Rejecting the notion that the fate of an artist is to starve, Shakespeare chose themes no less sensational than those which make our own Best Seller lists today -- murder, love, war, swordplay&duels, treachery, romance, double crossing and cross dressing.
What he did was elevate the lurid into high art.
The crime story, the murder mystery, the private eye caper;-- these are the commercial forms of our own time. Even our illiterate presidents read them. So --as I like to tell my writing students -- don’t dismiss the form out of hand. Wasn’t The Brothers Karamazov a crime story? Choosing to write in this genre may not guarantee you will get published. But it does maximize your chances for that to happen.
And indeed it is the form in which I write myself. For instance, "Goodbye," my one Book-of-the-Month choice, was a murder mystery thriller.
Let me hasten to say we both know being picked by the BOM is no measure of literary merit, up or down. But it does attest to a certain professional, hands-on knowledge of the market: how to get a story out from between your ears, down on paper, an agent found, and the book in print paid for by someone else.
Spenser, Nero Wolfe, Elvis Cole, Sam Spade, Joe Pike, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, Lindsay Boxer, Kay Scarpetta, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple;-- I read and re-read them all. But I love Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe best, and for the record let me state my belief The Big Sleep is likely to still be read a hundred years from now.
In England, these stories often take the Miss Marple form: murder in a country house, committed on a Sunday afternoon in front of a crackling fire and solved over the tea cups by someone very like your maiden aunt Nell. No wonder the Brits call this genre, "cozies".
The American version is darker. Taking us deep into Joseph Campbellland, "Sleep" is a modern dress replay of a powerful myth. In answer to a phone call, the lonely redeemer leaves his shabby office and gets into his nine-year-old-car, beginning a perilous voyage to right the wrongs of a world in which he is the moral superior of the Hollywood stars and Santa Barbara oil millionaires who hire him. Its' power is that of the fairy tale: we know from page one that no matter how dark the night, the crime will be found out, there will be a happy ending.
Where Chandler takes us the step beyond is Marlowe’s bittersweet acceptance that in this beautiful and unscrupulous world of ours, the evil in the human heart never ends, there will always be a role for him to play, there will always be another crime for him to solve tomorrow.
Bill Manville
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06/06/09

Dia rated it:

This isn't actually the book I read, but it's the closest I could find depicted on Goodreads...Mine is a 1964 omnibus edition that contains The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The High Window, and The Lady in the Lake.

With that piece of housekeeping out of the way, I will proceed to reviewing...or rather, in this case, to reverential, rhapsodic rejoicing!

I read these stories 15 years ago and was so enamored that I tried to write my own version of a Phillip Marlowe entang...more This isn't actually the book I read, but it's the closest I could find depicted on Goodreads...Mine is a 1964 omnibus edition that contains The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The High Window, and The Lady in the Lake.

With that piece of housekeeping out of the way, I will proceed to reviewing...or rather, in this case, to reverential, rhapsodic rejoicing!

I read these stories 15 years ago and was so enamored that I tried to write my own version of a Phillip Marlowe entanglement set in the place and time I lived, Bellingham, WA of 1994. Let's just say that I did not find Chandler so easily imitable! Or perhaps he is just too inseparable from 1940s LA. Fifteen years pass, much has changed for me (less hubris?), I pick up the book again...and find myself in some sort of bliss that absolutely will not be analyzed.

The High Window might be the best. Chandler's intellectual and observational, multisensory familiarity with furniture, lawns and landscaping, building facades, ornamental architectural features, flowers, jewelry, clothing, and, most of all, faces and mannerisms, is displayed so casually, so economically, so comically and poignantly that you can just picture the man writing his novel in his head as he walked about all the neighborhoods of LA. There's hardly a sentence here that doesn't show his almost oddly apolitical and nonjudgmental, super-astute class consciousness. Chandler uses time beautifully; I think most of these stories happen in three days or so, but they feel elongated by the way he alternates dialogue (where most of the action, in the form of plot twists, occurs) with solitary moments of waiting, noticing, thinking out loud to the reader, and waiting some more...all in witticisms that continually delight.

But here I seem to be trying to analyze again, perhaps secretly wishing to transport Marlowe to Windsor, VT of 2009. What would he notice here and now? Who would offer him their secrets and their deceptions?

What have we lost, that Marlowe may have no work to do in this place and time?

(less)

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03/27/08

Yahya rated it:

Read in March, 2008

راستش وقتی طرح جلد کتاب و عنوانش را دیدم، با خودم گفتم این کتاب خوبی نیست. کتاب البته ترجمه خیلی خوبی داشت و شروع خوبی هم داشت. ولی کل داستان حکایت کش دار دو روز بود. آدمهای بی ربط و مزخرفی داشت و "راز" قصه هم آنقدرها چیز دندانگیری نبود. البته نقاط قوت زیادی هم داشت، من جمله ش...more

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01/25/08

Chris rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in February, 2008

In my first round of reading Chandler (I had read The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye before starting this collection) I was most impressed by the language and the world-weary cynicism. This time, while I still loved those things, I also came to appreciate the nature of Chandler's detectives, especially Marlowe.

Unlike a lot of detectives, especially serialized detectives, Marlowe isn't that smart. He'll tell you so, repeatedly. Instead, Marlowe is a great detec...more

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06/27/07

Rob rated it:

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: mystery lovers

[D]efinitely [a] classic [piece] of American literature worthy of a second or even first tier position in the pantheon. [...] John commented on some parallels between Chandler and William Gibson (one of my perennial favorites), citing the former as a major and obvious influence on the latter. [...] I agree with John that Chandler’s influence on Gibson is apparent though I think they are going after far different goals as writers: Case is the illegitimate son of the illegitimate son of Philip M...more

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05/06/09

Taka rated it:

(review of isbn 0375415017)

bookshelves: detective-crime_fiction, japan_jul07-present

Read in June, 2009

Chandler is the man--

All the stories are packed with action and very engaging. Of all the three novels, Chandler is at his best in Farewell, My Lovely with his concise, imaginative descriptions and metaphors that kept me amazed throughout.

The Big Sleep is a solid novel with a good story rendered in unique prose. The High Window definitely drops in quality in my opinion, but still delivers a highly entertaining story.

After reading these novels, I have little ch...more

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09/22/07

Chander2 rated it:

bookshelves: currently-reading

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn't have to be. He could lie quiet in his ...more

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11/27/08

Elizabeth rated it:

See other Raymond Chandler review.

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01/14/09

Douglas Wilson rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in June, 2007

Lotta fun.

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01/06/08

Christian marked it as to-read

bookshelves: good_quotes_or_descriptions, to-read

This is a collection but if I only read The Big Sleep I would consider it 'read.' Marlowe is an interesting character: a sort of self-aware Don Quixote who understands he inhabits a world were morals are for suckers yet continues to follow them. The following quote is revealing: "I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights."

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08/23/07

Chris rated it:

(review of isbn 0375415009)

Read in January, 2008

Just picked this up. Really enjoyed reading Chandler on the train rides to/from work last winter. Don't know why, since the stories always seem to be set in southern Cal, but reading him during the winter felt like a good fit. Sort of like I can only listen to Van Halen during the summer. So I'll look forward to picking this up in 4-6 months, I'm guessing...

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08/27/07

Rory rated it:

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: fans of film noir, of course

i only read "the big sleep" in this anthology. partly because my stack of books to read is starting to scare me with its menacing height, and partly because...well, "the big sleep" was just really, really good. suggestive and sly and suspenseful. no wonder this guy's stuff was tapped for cinema adaptation so often.

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02/22/08

Rob Dinsmoor rated it:

Read in July, 2005

I love the language of this book, and the wonderfully vivid description of drunk low-lifes in (1930s?) Los Angeles. The book seems to deal more earnestly with subjects like homosexuality and pornography, which is hardly surprising given the Hayes Code of the time.

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03/22/08

Jessica rated it:

Read in March, 2008

Detective novels rock!!! I loved this book. . .I guess I will always have a special place in my heart for characters like Phillip Marlowe; the wonderfully detached private detective.

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05/10/07

Nils Samuels rated it:

(review of isbn 0375415017)

Any and all of these Chandler short novels are a delight, with world weary detective Marlow and LA of the 1940s. The wounded romantic as cynical helper to those in need.

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09/09/07

Robert rated it:

If you're going to read Chandler - and you should - you might as well get it all in one place, so these Library of America volumes are all you really need.

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05/07/09

bright_black rated it:

Read in June, 2009

Ooh that detective Marlowe is good.

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