My dad bought a two-volume collection of Raymond Chandler's work. He said he wanted to see if The Big Sleep makes any more sense as a book than it did as the Bogart/Bacall movie. He hadn't gotten around to reading it yet, but he loaned the volume to me anyway. I stuck to just reading the short stories at the first, placed under the general heading "Pulp Stories".
Based on that, my father's hope for clarity in plot may be dashed. I mean, I guess you can say the stories make sense, as Chandler usually has the detective character (who varies, a couple show up more than once, but not more than 2-3 times) lay everything out at the end. But these are not what I'd call fair-play mysteries. The reader's best bet is just to guess based on the conventions of these kinds of stories. Assuming you're the kind of person who likes to try and figure out what's happening ahead of time.
It's pretty clear Chandler's most interested in descriptions, of both people and places, and dialogue. Sometimes he takes the metaphorical approach, when he describes a woman's hair as sucking up all the light so there's a halo around it. Other times he goes for something more, I think self-consciously silly. Describing a gunman as a "long thin man" with a "long thin face". Mostly Chandler just seems to love dry dialogue. The clever one-liners and smart comebacks. Outside of the characters that are there to be goons, everybody in a Raymond Chandler story is very glib, and basically never at the loss for a good phrase. Which is fine with me, they're fun to read.
Most of the stories are roughly similar. There's a detective, sometimes doing OK financially, sometimes not. Always ready with a dry remark. There's a beautiful woman. Sometimes she hires the detective, sometimes she's the one being investigated. Either way, there's trouble that isn't actually what it seems at first glance. Like they always used to say on House, everybody lies. Blackmail comes up a fair amount, so does infidelity. More than one story revolves around pearl necklaces, including "Pearls Are a Nuisance," naturally, but also "Goldfish". No missing gemstones, though. Maybe Chandler considered rubies too exotic for a private detective.
I was expecting the protagonist to get killed at least once, but it never happens. Which isn't to say they always win, necessarily. Sometimes they're just fortunate to limp home with bruises but minus any bullet holes. The cops usually make an appearance. Sometimes they're crooked ("Blackmailers Don't Shoot") and sometimes they just enjoy tap dancing on a guy's face if he won't give answers. There is one story - "Spanish Blood" - where the main character is a cop. But the crime involves the death of a childhood friend and he gets the "turn in your badge" speech part way through, so he's effectively a private detective after that point.
"Pearls Are a Nuisance," is the most unusual story of the group. It's still a basic mystery about missing pearls, but the main character is a wealthy young college guy who does not appear to be any sort of detective. His fiance ropes him in to helping the lady she acts as a private nurse for, and he gives the appearance of not being any good at it at all. He still offers the chance to write witty dialogue, but in a very different tone. More educated, more chatty. It almost feels like a send-up of Chandler's other stories, where the protagonist actually has a very low tolerance for alcohol but doesn't seem to recognize it, and spends pages at a time cheerfully wasted. It made for a nice change of pace.
'For a moment neither man moved. Then Steve kicked the trombone away from him and squashed his cigarette in a glass tray. His black eyes were empty but his mouth grinned whitely.
"If you want trouble," he said, "I come from where they make it."' (From "The King in Yellow")
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