The King in Yellow / Král ve žlutém rouše

by Raymond Chandler, Tomáš Korbař (Translator)

V povídce Král v žlutém rouše se vyšetřování vraždy v obskurním hotelu ujímá jeden z četných předchůdců soukromého detektiva Phila Marlowa, jenž nese už všechny znaky svého slavného následovníka: idealistický dříč, ochránce slabých a napadených, jenž je obdařený fyzickou odolností, bohatou fantazií a neuhasitelnou žízní po whisky.

Součástí tohoto vydání je i jindy samostatně vydávaná povídka Počkám na tebe / I will be waiting. Kniha je opatřena lexikálním komentářem pod čarou.

Genres: Crime, Fiction, Audiobook, Noir, Mystery, Adventure

240 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2011

About the author

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.

The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list. The latter novel was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field. In it he wrote: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held."

Reviews

[Andrei Bădică]

"- Oricum ai privi-o, viața înseamnă o mulțime de necazuri."
"- (...). Crime adevărate, nix. Aici în munți puține lucruri te împing la crimă. Muntenii sunt oameni foarte pașnici."

[Razvan Banciu]

Sad and somehow without much logic included, as all the events could be constructed in many other ways very easily and the final is far from being a happy one.
Otherwise, despite being disarmed by all types of various citizens, Steve Grayce is still a detective and not a clerk...

[Jack Heath]

3 Stars. Another of those snappy shorts for which author Raymond Chandler is so well known, and for which he later substituted the detective, in this case Steve Grayce, with Philip Marlowe. My version has Grayce in the lead. It first appeared in the magazine "Dime Detective" in 1938, and I caught it as one of nine in "The Simple Art of Murder" of 1950 which was reprinted most recently by Vintage. This one is 54 pages; actually all them are novellas. Grayce is employed as the house dick at the Carlton Hotel in Bay City (Santa Monica) California. It's so quiet the management likes to avoid saying they have such a position. A disturbance occurs late one night. The occupant in room 815 is King Leopardi, the great trumpet player. Grayce admires his music and style but having an impromptu concert in the halls of the 8th floor is too much! The band leader is difficult; he tries to shoot Grayce, and eviction results. Not a good idea as the owner of the hotel has hired the King to play his club a few days later. Grayce gets fired. One dead body leads to another, and they soon include Leopardi in his yellow pajamas! A fun read and a nice bit of detection. (January 2021)

[Antonis]

Αν εξαιρέσει κανείς την ιδιόρρυθμη έως και αστεία σε κάποια σημεία μετάφραση, οι τρεις νουβέλες του βιβλίου ικανοποιούν και με το παραπάνω τους φίλους του hard-boiled. Αυτό που είναι όμως πραγματικό αριστούργημα είναι η εισαγωγή του ίδιου του συγγραφέα.

[Jamie]

Flashes of Chandler's brilliance here, with a hotel detective sniffing around a situation that just smells funny and draws him in with every turn. The detective could just as easily have been Philip Marlowe. There is scant detectable difference. Cheeky, wisecracking, hardboiled, stubborn as all hell and driven to sniff out the truth for himself if nobody else. Includes some real seedy characters, and an especially brash and loathsome musician as the titular "King".

[Sara Gerot]

Short Chandler hotel mystery. Total classic with some hilarious lines. Plus I'm a sucker for anything set in a hotel. It was a good one to read while staying at a hotel this week. They call the main character the "house dick" so every time I saw hotel security officer I thought of this moniker and laughed.

[Lokinda Julia]

Да блин! Хотела почитать ужастик с тем же названием, но спутала авторов и прочитала этот детективчик. Такой себе детективчик. Слабый. Мне кажется, Донцова, которую я как-то взяла у мамы дома с полки лет 20 назад, и то была интереснее.

[Kotai Gyuri]

Nemira

[itchy]

Read as part of the collection The Simple Art of Murder.

[George]

Read the text at http://ae-lib.org.ua/texts-c/chandler..., apparently on a Ukrainian world-literature collection. Nothing memorable, but nothing wrong with it.

[Apostolos]

Χιουμοριστικά γραμμένα.

[Jörg]

Interessant, schnell durch gelesen

[Johannes]

3,5

[Kevin Dumcum]

Some nice deduction work, but it seemed to me that the execution of the crime was way out of proportion of the motive.

[Ondrej Sykora]

This book is much better translated than 'Finger man' from the same publisher. This time, the translation is done by a professional and even the number of errors in the text is much smaller.

What is also nice - or rather what would be nice if it was done properly - is that each page contains explanations of several words from that page. The problem with these explanations is that they were not done by the original translator, but apparently by some random person with an english dictionary, who doesn't know anything about translation, the English language and who even did not read the text.

How else can I explain that they seem almost randomly picked: almost none of them is the most difficult word on the respective page; almost none of them explains the slang/colloquial language used by the characters of the book. And in many cases, the word is translated/explained in a completely different context and grammatical form (e.g. the word is a verb in the original text, but it's explained as a noun that does not fit into the original text at all).

The whole "translator notes" business could be very interesting if done by the original translator. This way it's either pointless (for those who understand well) or rather misleading for those who depend on them.

[Maria Longley]

This Czech-English version has two short stories of Raymond Chandler's: The King in Yellow and I'll Be Waiting. We have all the elements of Great Noir here (as described by the Library of America): the hotel detective, the deceptively vulnerable girl, shady underworld figures, menacing shadows, and threats of violence. The first story also has a mystery to solve but "I'll Be Waiting" doesn't really bother with it. Apparently Chandler disowned "I'll Be Waiting" but I have to say I really liked it. The hotel detectives go around keeping the peace at night and doing other random things that time and distance have rendered unfathomable. (The night setting in a hotel with the mystery and menace brought to mind "The Night Manager" tv series for some reason.)

Translated from the English by Tomáš Korbař

[Tingles]

Meine nette Bibliothekarin gab mir dieses Buch statt den Klassiker von Robert W. Chambers. Der Fehler ist mir erst viel später aufgefallen, das Buch hat mir trotzdem gefallen.

Kurz, knackig, voller Charme und altem Krimi-Flair. Manchmal etwas billig, aber gute Unterhaltung.

---

A nice librarian gave me this instead of the cult-classic by Robert W. Chambers. I didn't notice the mistake until halfway through the audiobook, but was content with the story regardless of that.

A short book full of crimes and old-school detective work. A little bit cheap at times. I enjoyed it.