Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels

Library of America #79

by Raymond Chandler, Frank MacShane (Editor)

In Raymond Chandler’s hands, the pulp crime story became a haunting mystery of power and corruption, set against a modern cityscape both lyrical and violent. Now Chandler joins the authoritative Library of America series in a comprehensive two-volume set displaying all the facets of his brilliant talent.

In his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the classic private eye finds his full-fledged form as Philip Marlowe: at once tough, independent, brash, disillusioned, and sensitive—and man of weary honor threading his way (in Chandler’s phrase) “down these mean streets” among blackmailers, pornographers, and murderers for hire.

In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Chandler’s personal favorite among his novels, Marlowe’s search for a missing woman leads him from shanties and honky-tonks to the highest reaches of power, encountering an array of richly drawn characters. The High Window (1942), about a rare coin that becomes a catalyst by which a hushed-up crime comes back to haunt a wealthy family, is partly a humorous burlesque of pulp fiction. All three novels show Chandler at a peak of verbal inventiveness and storytelling drive

Stories and Early Novels also includes every classic noir story from the 1930s that Chandler did not later incorporate into a novel—thirteen in all, among them such classics as “Red Wind,” “Finger Man,” The King in Yellow," and “Trouble Is My Business.” Drawn from the pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective, these stories show how Chandler adapted the violent conventions of the pulp magazine—with their brisk exposition and rapid-fire dialogue—to his own emerging vision of 20th-century America.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Short Stories, Crime, Noir, Classics, Literature

1199 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1933

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

[J.J. Rodeo]

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 شهر محل وقوع داستان که نماد یک اشرافیت "قلابی" بود؛ آدمهای تازه به دوران رسیده ای که زور می زدند برای خودشان کسی باشند. و شخصیت اول داستان هم تجسم واقعگرایی تلخی بود که در نهایت پوچی این بند و بساط ها را بر ملا می کرد. از دیگر نقاط قوت کتاب، دیالوگهای محشر و نفسگیرش بود (خصوصا دیالوگهایی که شخصیت اصلی با زنها داشت!). ولی از طرف دیگر، خیلی از توصیفات اضافی بود و برای فضاسازی، احتیاجی به همه آنها نبود. به نظر من نویسنده موفق شده بود درست حرفش را بزند و به دل هم می نشست. ولی در نهایت، تنها می توان گفت که این کتاب، بیانیه غرایی بود، ولی داستان جذابی نداشت.ا