Raymond Chandler Omnibus: The Big Sleep (1939); Farewell, my Lovely (1940); The High Window (1942); The Lady in the Lake (1943).

When I had a Hammett habit I needed to kick, I tried to start Farewell, My Lovely, and found it unpalatable, primarily because of the racism on display in the opening chapter. But left-wing intellectuals beware: Chandler addiction can strike anybody, no matter how sensitive or sensible they may consider themselves. Having chain-read these four novels, it's hard for me to identify a favorite, or even a fundamental difference. Perhaps it was my tendency to read in bed at the end of the day (and with Chandler you keep reading long after exhaustion makes it a struggle to keep your eyes open), but none of the stories invited me to wonder what was behind their mystery. It was all about the style, and Marlowe's vermouthless wit, about which much has been written by others elsewhere, but nobody will ever write about him as well as Chandler. The alienation of Los Angeles is well-established, how a blinding sweaty desert can be noir. In a few sharp sentences, Chandler makes his characters pop off the page. What stands out, though not far, is that in two of the four volumes Philip Marlowe seems to encounter a character he likes, and in Farewell, My Lovely he performs an act of great sympathy for which nobody pays him. Farewell, My Lovely will build those page-turning muscles and turn you into an asymmetric Popeye adonis. It is quite a card trick, a typewritten prestidigitation extraordinaire. Every chapter opens the novel anew, when yet another vivid, if stereotypical character, walks into Marlowe's office. But each new card is drawn from the same deck, or so we are told after the fact, but the dealer is so fast and graceful we don't even care. So perhaps all these scenes add up to a novel, a story, a plot, perhaps not. But here is detective fiction at its very best. I laughed, but guys like me and Philip Marlowe don't cry, no matter how many times we are hit in the head and wake up in another scene with no idea how we got there. I wasn't sure whether I couldn't follow the plot, didn't care, or it wasn't there. But in the wonderful Lady in the Lake I discovered that it was all too much. In those lurching final chapters I would pause every page, and try to explain to myself out loud how the characters and the various identities by which they were known were intertwined in a dense web of deception, blackmail, murder, adultery, and corruption, but it made my brain smoke. It was too complicated and there was no deep incentive to care. I liked to believe that in each novel, no more than once, the writer revealed that he had a heart. But I can't really prove it. Buy yourself a drink, and pour yourself a stiff novel. But don't smoke, or read, in bed.