Noir: Raymond Chandler
…he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed
again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does
when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right
and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter
world.
Raymond
Chandler
The High Window
1942
A taste of pre-war Las
Angeles, quite a different world than we think of when we think of LA; in
many respects, however, much the same.
Raymond Chandler ended his
business career in 1933 and started writing short stories and novels, The
Big Sleep (which became the famous, all be it toned down, Bogart,
Bacall movie). Philip
Marlowe, Chandler’s wise cracking, somewhat shady hero, became a
benchmark for many of fiction’s detectives and heroes to follow.
Indiana Jones comes to mind as a wise cracking, hero who doesn’t
see a defined border between right and wrong, as much as a gray zone that
he’s willing to maneuver in order to assure a justifiable success.
Chandler’s style is slower
than we are used to today; the above excerpt is typical of his way to have
you understand a character, an action, a room or the ‘lay of the
land.’ His books are all
worth reading, even Farewell, My Lovely, in which he temporarily
experiments with the Marlowe character.
Joseph De Matteo
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