BINGE-READING RAYMOND CHANDLER.

Where did I start? The same place I started from originally: with Raymond Chandler’s books about the detective Philip Marlowe. When I decided to read them, I chose to read the books first and the short stories after. This was, accidentally, the best move I made.
   If you want to read Chandler’s detective stories, start with the books. This is for an obvious reason. He wrote the short stories and then welded a few stories into one book: The Big Sleep. And he would do that again for other novels. So read the books first. If you read the short stories and then the novels...you’ll think the books are awfully familiar in places.
   You owe it to yourself to read the books before the short pieces. I started there. Recently I decided to read Chandler again. All in a rush. So I started there, all over again. What is the body of work? Novels. Completed ones. Detective books. Big on mood, and atmosphere. Plotting takes a back seat. That’s Chandler’s style. What did I binge-read?
   The Big Sleep.
   Farewell, My Lovely.
   The High Window.
   The Lady in the Lake.
   The Little Sister.
   The Long Good-Bye.
   Playback.
   No Poodle Springs fragment completed by another hand after Chandler’s death. All Chandler, and all books. In order. But not quite in the order I’d like. I’ll return to that bit. But first, what is it you read, if you binge your way through Raymond Chandler’s books?
   There are no two-minute eggs in this collection. These stories are boiled hard, for at least ten minutes and maybe longer than that. There’s a lot of world-weary talk in these novels. Chandler pretty much hates everyone and everything. The books started up in the late 1930s, and continued through the 1940s and into the 1950s and Chandler’s death. It’s difficult to keep on writing after that. Brain-in-a-jar technology is always five years away.
   Hates everyone? In other words, expect racism. Chandler isn’t nice to black people. Mexicans, he generally doesn’t care for. He has a bit of a hate on for the Native American. It’s the mid-1940s, so hating on the Chinese sits next to detesting the Japanese. If there hadn’t been a Japanese sneak-attack, he’d have scorned the Japanese anyway.
   Chandler finds time to hate a lot of rich white people. And poor white people, too. He certainly hates himself. When television starts to appear in his fiction, he hates that as well. He finds time, through his character of Marlowe, to hate crooked cops and corrupt politicians. Hollywood-coded homosexuals fare no better. Chandler finds the time to hate the homophobic cops who hate the Hollywood-coded homosexuals. If he’d lived longer, he’d have written up a murder mystery about the death of Santa Claus.
   Women get their own separate category of hatred.
   If there’s a soft-boiled woman within Marlowe’s view, he’s sapped over the head before he can comment. Men murder men in Chandler’s books. And men murder women. Women do their share of murdering, too. Marlowe does kill. But he also spends a lot of time taking guns off people or having guns grabbed away from him.
   I bought these books one at a time, even though I could have picked up the whole collection at once. Then I bought the volumes of short stories and dived on in. Later, I’d return to a book to remind myself of the mood. The mood: desperate people commit all sorts of crimes. Marlowe trails along in the bloodied wake, finding bodies as he goes.
   One book stood out. I remember enjoying the story. Until I revisited the book, in isolation. For whatever reason, the novel fell flat for me. There seemed to be less in it than I remembered. That was The High Window. I guess I was in a mood myself, that time.
   Now, over the past week, I binged on Marlowe’s exploits. Reading each book hot on the heels of the last, I gained a deeper appreciation for the things Chandler did well. His stories are coffee-strong on mood and atmosphere. People will tell you Chandler wasn’t all that interested in plot. He was interested. Mood and atmosphere, the style, interested him a hell of a lot more.
   So what did I notice, this time around? Coffee and booze and cigarettes – oh, and pipes – don’t inhabit the landscape. They are the landscape. Cigars: not so much. In that time period you could buy information by waving a dollar around. Every story Marlowe hears from a suspect is screwy. And everyone Marlowe interviews is a suspect.
   If a bird turns up in a tale, chances are it’s a hummingbird. Radios blat, more than once. Chandler’s stories seethe with blatting radios. Climbing the corporate ladder inside a building involves sitting in a corner office. Occasionally, some of Chandler’s characters might even be sober as they get behind the wheel of a car.
   Los Angeles becomes a character, but not a character anyone could learn to like. Marlowe finds it difficult to cope with straight cops. The default setting is crooked. Big business could only grow big off the back of big crime. Chandler was an oil-man, and didn’t have to be told twice about that.
   Over the span of these books, Marlowe moves from the 1930s to the 1950s. He does so a little slowly, not quite ageing one year for every year that passes. That puts him in the same general area as a lot of fictional detectives. As the tales move into the 1950s, Marlowe and Chandler are both painfully aware that the world is leaving them both behind.
   It is jarring to read of television, helicopters, jet aircraft, and science fiction. Why would Marlowe bother mentioning them? He dances to his writer’s voice. Chandler decides. If we skip the details you could pin down to a specific time, what else covers the atmosphere in these books?
   Driving. Marlowe has to travel around to interview people, crumple under a sap, face bullets, crack wise at dirty cops, and so on. Driving gives Marlowe time to think. He doesn’t think very well of the world in general or California specifically. Driving time is time spent crossing California. To Marlowe, it’s such a chore.
   These, then, are the things you’ll notice if you binge-read Chandler’s books: closeted homosexuals and the cops who hate them a little too much for their own reputations, women as damaged goods, coffee, cigarettes, cigarette-holders, booze and lots of it only more so, corner offices, the smell of sandalwood, hummingbirds, the blatting of the radio, driving, being knocked out, violence, cracking wise to tough guys, tough guys cracking wise back, Hollywood as a cess-pit only more so…
   You’ve got the wrong attitude, reader. You’re not human tonight.

The Big Sleep. This is the novel brewed up using a formula. Take a few earlier stories, stitch them together, amplify on the text, square away most of the holes generated by a new overall plot, and ratchet up the mood. Place emphasis on the mood.
   Chandler gives us the detective caught up in two separate cases that somehow dovetail into the same case. There’s a hallucinatory feel to the book, starting in the unwholesome greenhouse where Marlowe is given his assignment. Do one thing. But don’t look into the other thing. Everyone assumes Marlowe is hired to look into the other thing.
   This brings a million complications. It’s a tough old world, boiled and uncompromising, and Marlowe is sent stumbling through it. Occasionally bruised and battered, he survives to go off into the sequel. And if you thought that was a plot spoiler, go fry a stale egg.
   What emerges from this first book? Marlowe wasn’t the character’s name, originally. He was going to be Mallory. Why? We dig deep into Arthurian legend here. Sir Thomas Malory had a huge hand in tales of King Arthur. And Chandler’s work is full of references to knights.
   This first book sees Marlowe on his way to that greenhouse. Before he reaches it, though, he catches sight of artwork at the entrance to the mansion. Or castle. A knight, but not one in shining armour, is untying a naked damsel in distress. We get plenty of knight references after this.
   Marlowe enjoys chess puzzles. And the knight is that peculiar piece in chess. It makes a sideways move to go forward. And Marlowe as a detective has to make a load of side-moves to gain any forward progress. It’s no surprise that Marlowe could have been Mallory, after Malory. He’s Marlowe, after the playwright Kit Marlowe. An outright Shakespearean name-reference would’ve been too close to the bone when dealing with tragedy. Chandler was no slouch in throwing Shakespearean references at the readers.
   Having revisited Chandler’s first book, what did I find? The jump from one case to another works. Here begins the recurring theme. Was a suicide a murder? Maybe a murder was actually suicide. The big question about the death of the chauffeur – who killed him – goes away if Chandler/Marlowe writes it off as suicide.
   It’s a great beginning to a detective series. And I still rate it highly.

Farewell, My Lovely. Arthurian references abound. Ultimately, Marlowe is on a quest for a woman named Grayle. And that’s no coincidence. A grail-quest is just the right sort of mission for a slightly tarnished knight like Marlowe. Again we have two cases and nothing to connect them. The connective tissue is there, though, and Chandler is far more adept at welding older stories together here.
   It’s one thing to write a classic introductory mission for a detective. But it’s really something else to create a classic follow-up. The atmosphere here is built up through unconnected stories merging strangely in the night. Of all the characters Chandler gives us, he gives us Marlowe. But he remembers to throw a Shakespearean supporting cast his way, too.
   Moose Malloy, a force of nature and a storm at that, flits through the story with all the grace of a vampire bat – tied to the back of a raging bull in a China shop. Everything is larger than life in Chandler’s fiction, and Moose Malloy is the poster-child for that theme. It’s the switch to pursuit of jade in the second case, tied to the first case, that still fascinates on returning to this book.

The High Window. I liked this, read it again and it left me cold…but reading them rapidly one after another creates more of an atmosphere inside these books. This time around, I appreciated far much more was going on and it didn’t leave me flat at all. It jumped up off the floor and took its rightful place back there in the series.
   You’ll notice I’m trying to limit myself to the details of the plot. I’ll throw this at you, instead. Another Arthurian reference. Marlowe is almost Sir Galahad. But worn-out. World-weary. Shop-soiled. Given his womanising, he’s more like Lancelot after accidentally-on-purpose sleeping with the Queen while the King is away. More chess pieces, of course. Yes, I returned to liking this one. Maybe it is the overall package, reading book after book, relentlessly, that helped.

The Lady in the Lake. There’s little that’s more Arthurian than a reference to a lady in a lake. Here, we are in the mid-1940s and America is at war. This is the home front that American troops are defending, and what a crime-ridden setting it is. Or is there a crime? The lady found in the lake might have died there accidentally or suicidally. Sure, there’s a murder suspect. But there’s always a murder suspect. The lakeside setting takes Marlowe out of his usual stomping-ground, but he goes back and forth.
   We have series continuity, with Chandler building up the corrupt Bay City. Characters from one book turn up in another. Marlowe sees a few familiar faces across the seven-novel series. At this point, we’ve reached that peculiar blip in the road.
   Chandler worked in Hollywoodland, and detested it. He turned in a script called Playback. Chandler was paid for this, but the movie was never made. Nice work if you can get it. Later, at the end of his career, Chandler took elements of the screenplay and worked his way up to a book of the same title.
   But. The best place for Playback, in the series, is after The Lady in the Lake and before The Little Sister. If Chandler had worked up the energy, he could’ve rewritten Playback to follow in the trail of continuity after The Lady in the Lake. I still believe that’s where it should have gone, in the reading order. Alas, it was not to be. Playback became something else, entirely.

The Little Sister. Chandler throws Shakespeare at us early in this one, with a reference to Lady Macbeth. The devastating level of world-weariness in this book is something to marvel at. I’m talking about chapter thirteen. Chandler, through Marlowe, has a go at California, Los Angeles, and Hollywood and he takes no prisoners. Expect blatting from the radio.
   Chapter thirteen is a driving scene, giving Marlowe a platform on which to rage against California. It’s one of the standout pieces of writing in this novel. Chandler gives us more bile in a later driving scene when he’s heading to a confrontation. He’s not done.
   Of the plot I can say nothing. If you had a hard time working out who killed the chauffeur way at the start of these books, you’ll be scratching your head over the murder confessions in this one. When people turn up to cover for someone else, bending Marlowe’s ear with an agenda, where does the truth lie but dead in the dust…
   Much of the book turns on the murder of Moe Stein. He deserved murdering, of course. I’ll draw your attention to a doctor: Vincent Lagardie. We’ll return to that point in The Long Good-Bye. Anyway, this entry in the series stays with you. It’s later Chandler, and he’s still on top form.

The Long Good-Bye. Everything builds to this. It’s the finest finish to a detective series that I can think of. Yes, it is followed by Playback. But the series ends here. You know it. I know it. This is a much longer book, and Chandler uses the space to let characters breathe a little: Marlowe, in particular.
   There’s a piece of plotting around finding a crooked doctor. The letter V features big-time. No, Marlowe isn’t hunting for Vincent Lagardie. But isn’t it strange that, across two books, there are four doctors associated with the letter V, and all of them are crooks…
   Marlowe finds the crooked doctor almost immediately. But he can’t be sure. So he follows up on the other leads. Dead-ends, barely worth the shoe-leather. But I liked the depiction of chasing after loose ends and tying them off before returning to the better prospect and hunting the true culprit down.
   In a shorter novel, Chandler would have limited himself to one suspect. To save space in the book, if nothing else. But this novel opens up, takes its time, and builds to that ending. This is as late as Chandler gets. The series ends here. Except that he dusts off a screenplay from the 1940s and has one more go.

Playback. This is a much shorter book. Lean. Chandler gets on with it. And I like it. There are great moments in here. It’s no way to end a series, not after The Long Good-Bye. But here we are. More tough guys making with tough guy acts. I remember one character vividly, and that’s an old man in the hotel, the man who could lip-read. Call it a hunch. I felt sure Raymond Chandler was writing himself into the story. No, I’m not the first to think that, and I won’t be the last.
   This is the end, and it is okay. It would be much better to shunt this story back before The Little Sister and to edit accordingly. That’s where this one truly belongs. After this, there was an attempt to write again. Chandler produced a fragment completed by Robert B. Parker. That’s called Poodle Springs. But we’re not talking about that here.
   What did I think of the series? It worked. In its time, it was steeped in the 1930s and 1940s. Here and now. Fresh. If you go wading through the fiction and find it cliché-ridden, remember those clichés had to start somewhere. Marlowe, for better or worse, became a template for the tough private detective.
   Chandler’s writing endures. Readers waltzing unawares into the fiction will discover that hard-boiled gritty writing isn’t terribly nice to women. It doesn’t show men in a great light, either. Everyone and everything is tough. The toughest character in the books? Los Angeles. Not even an earthquake could erase the stain of it.