The Chandler Collection: Volume 3

by Raymond Chandler

Trade Paperback, 783 pages. Volume 3 of set

Genres: Fiction, Anthologies, Crime, Mystery

783 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

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

[D.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume collects Pearls are a Nuisance, The Smart-Aleck Kill and Killer in the Rain. I've reviewed each book separately below.
Pearls are a Nuisance
This is a collection of short stories (well, three stories and an essay), all previously collected with others in the longer short-story collection The Simple Art of Murder.
'Pearls Are a Nuisance': Effete detective Walter Gage gets wrangled into investigating some missing pearls by their owner's nurse, who happens to be his fiancée. The chief suspect is the recently-resigned driver, a man called Henry Eichelberger. Gage starts his investigation there, but instead of it ending with Eichelberger, we are led through a laborious trudge through the plot while a drunken homoerotic partnership forms between prime suspect and detective. The writing is surprisingly weak for Chandler, lacking his usual panache and clipped pace, and the characterisation of the two main characters feels like he's taken his typical hardboiled-detective and split him into two parts. Neither of them comes out well. I've read maybe seven Chandler novels now, and a book of his short fiction, and this is hands down the worst I've read from him.
'Finger Man': Philip Marlowe returns here, and in typical Chandler form. For a very short story, there's a great deal of plot and a great number of characters in this story. Marlowe is hired by his occasional associate Lou Harger to act as some backup/muscle for a visit to a casino. Marlowe has just given evidence against a major political player in a corruption trial, and should be lying low, but as a favour to Harger allows his interest to be piqued enough to tag along. By morning, someone's dead, there's a woman in Marlowe's office with a huge wad of money, and another political player is after the private eye for a beautiful frame-up. Just a typical day in Chandler-land. The writing is tight and fluid here, and the characters in classic Chandler style, but the ending is seriously damaged by several characters serving up lengthy exposition to tie up an unnecessarily complicated plot.
'The King in Yellow': We meet Steve Grayce, a particularly hard-boiled version of the usually-soppy house dick. Right off the bat, we see he's something different: first time we see him, he's lounging on pillows listening to jazz, then he goes upstairs and roughs up one of that genres finer performers. Classy stuff. He loses his job, but eventually gains a female admirer and (of course) gets himself in a pretty hefty mess.
This is typical Chandler, but in a slightly recast mould. Rather than the hardened private detective on a case, Grayce feels more like an honourable fellow who has put himself in a bad situation but is determined to work his way back out. Unfortunately, there's a great deal going on here for such a short story, and the ending comes a bit abruptly with more twists than necessary. Still, a pretty satisfying bit of storytelling.
'The Simple Art of Murder': This is not a story at all, but rather an essay of literary criticism. Chandler rates and berates his genre, his fellow authors and occasionally writing in general with his usual pace and wit. It's an entertaining read, not only for its revelation of the author's views on crime-writing, but at least also as a primer in what to read beyond his own output.

Smart-Aleck Kill
This book collects four of Chandler's short stories from the mid-1930s: 'Smart-Aleck Kill,' 'Pick-Up on Noon Street,' 'Nevada Gas' and 'Spanish Blood.' As with any collection of shorter works, this one is hit-and-miss. The finest all-around, and closest to Chandler's usual standard, is 'Spanish Blood.' It follows typically Chandleresque cop Sam Delaguerra through an equally typical political LA murder tale, with stops through the criminal underground and the lower reaches of society along the way. Chandler's brilliant knack for phrasing is evident here as in his best.
The weakest link in this chain is probably 'Pick-Up on Noon Street,' where the usual latent racism of the period takes a distinct front street. Chandler presents stereotypes here so caricaturish that it felt as though he were trying to prove something in even presenting this for publication. Beyond that, it also ranks as among the least atmospheric, least engaging of his fiction that I've read.
The other two entries here are fairly mediocre (by Chandler standards), though 'Nevada Gas' has the brilliant device of a spy-level gimmick car to boost its credentials. It came as no surprise to find these stories came from the earliest part of Chandler's crime-writing career; his voice was not yet firmly in place, though the elements are clearly beginning to take form.
This is a collection for the completist, rather than for the beginning Chandler reader.

Killer in the Rain
This is a collection of several of Chandler's early pulp stories from various sources: 'Killer in the Rain,' 'The Man Who Liked Dogs,' 'The Curtain,' 'Try the Girl,' 'Mandarin's Jade,' 'Bay City Blues,' 'The Lady in the Lake,' and 'No Crime in the Mountains' (my personal favourite from this set). Herein we can see the incestuous evolution of these stories into the bigger and better-known later works from Chandler (e.g., The Big Sleep). However, these are all pre-Marlowe tales, though the character himself is recognisable within even without the handle. This is a splendid place to just jump in and grab a story or two, perhaps to whet one's appetite for more.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Finger Man'.

This is sort of the first appearance of Philip Marlowe. According to Wikipedia, the narrator was not named when this, Chandler's third published story, originally appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1934. In later publications a slight tweak was made, to establish this guy as Marlowe.

The essential Marlovian quality is present here, making this an appropriate choice to bring into the Marlowe canon, whereas a lot of Chandler's other early short fiction -- competent, well-crafted and enjoyable though it is -- does not belong. (My notion of the essential Marlovian quality comes from reading The Big Sleep about 20 years ago, and watching the Bogart movie three or four times. I've also seen the Elliot Gould movie of The Long Goodbye, which is awesome.)

Here we have a complicated plot, where the real effect of the story does not come from the detective working out who did it, or why, or how. The specifics of the plot, the particular betrayals and sell-outs and motives, are incidental. This is the story of a man who happens to be a detective discovering fundamental flaws in the universe, human nature and civilisation. Perhaps he already knew about all this, which is how he managed to survive the story. The melancholy tone of the story comes from the terrible confirmation of his sad knowledge.

'It's a shame how little account some folks take of human life -- or twenty-two grand.'

Here and in The Big Sleep the contrast to this essential wrongness of the world is the surprising discovery that some poor random guy -- here, the cab driver Tom Sneyd -- is at least as decent as the narrator.