Tag: Raymond Chandler

‘The Curtain’ by Raymond Chandler

“The first time I ever saw Larry Batzel he was drunk outside Sardi’s in a secondhand Rolls-Royce.”

No no! you say, that isn’t right: Raymond Chandler’s 1953 The Long Goodbye starts, “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”

But this isn’t the novel, it’s one of his earlier short stories that he reworked, spliced together, reconfigured into the better-known books. This one is mainly the germ of The Big Sleep, though its opening incident – the P.I. meets a damaged man who spins him a yarn – recurs in The Long Goodbye. This novel – about friendship, devotion (it’s way better than The Great Gatsby), coffee and booze – is brilliant, so it’s illuminating to see this way-stage in its creation.

Reading this Collected Stories, in a volume heavy enough that it could kill a man, is slightly disorientating, like walking through the back rooms of a cinema where films of all the Chandlers are showing on different screens at staggered times and the reels have got mixed up: the same noir images flicker, repeat, start again then veer off differently.

I like this fuzzy repetition, whether it was prompted by financial need, lack of new ideas, or, (I’d hope) a compulsion to keep telling parts of the same story again and again. Because it won’t leave you alone.

First published in Black Mask, 1936. Collected in Killer in the Rain, Houghton Mifflin / Riverside Press, 1964, and in Collected Stories, Everyman’s Library, 2002

‘Red Wind’ by Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler began writing late in life and peaked early in his career, never surpassing his last couple of pulp stories and first novel, The Big Sleep. From self-mocking title through muted farewell, 1939’s ‘Trouble Is My Business’ delivers quintessence of Chandler in a compact package. At the moment, though, I’m even more drawn to 1938’s ‘Red Wind’, partly because it holds the Chandler line I recite most often (“Just another four-flusher”), and partly because I can excerpt its opening and closing paragraphs without spoilers:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

and:

They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.

Originally published in Dime Detective, 1938, and frequently reprinted