Reading? Nothing beats Raymond Chandler

For Christmas I finally got the complete writings of Raymond Chandler. Usually right from the beginning sentence or paragraph Chandler announces he means business with your attention. Take the opening of Trouble Is My Business (one of four stories in the collection of the same name):

“Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Her eyes were shiny black buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same color. She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon’s tomb and was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. She said: ‘I need a man.’ “

Notice how the slobbering sounding (unkempt, piggish, sloppy)  ’putty-faced ‘ is accentuated by its immediate nicely groomed implying contrast: ‘tailor made suit’.”  Though reversed in order he makes the same contrast with ‘cheeks were as soft’ as ‘suet’–in other words, as soft as the white fat on the kidneys and loins of sheep.

Noirguage: hot (or is that cool) language of the thirties and forties

No. your average jasper in the street didn’t talk like this. This was the vigorous earthy language of the private detective novel and films of the times. My favorite? The big sleep, i.e., death (Chandler).

Alderman: A man’s pot belly.

Berries: Dollars

Caboose: Jail

Daylight, as in “let the daylight in” or “fill him with daylight”: Put a hole in, by shooting or stabbing

Eel juice: liquor

Flivver: A Ford automobile

Glad rags: Fancy clothes

Have the bees: To be rich

Hop-head: Drug addict, esp. heroin

Iron: A car

Jasper: A man (perhaps a hick)

Knockover: Heist, theft

Lunger: Someone with tuberculosis

Lead poisoning: To be shot

Mush: Face

Read hundreds more from a fantastic online book: Twists, Slug and Roscoes–A Glossary of Hard-Boiled Slang I came across this glossary several years ago and referenced it many times while reading Raymond Chandler’s books and other detective fiction of the time.

Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve been watching the new DVD editions of the Perry Mason series (I got hooked on these when they ran on TBS a few years ago). These shows have some great lines–to wit…”Faces? I don’t know faces. Faces are like cockroaches; they all look alike…”

The crux of life

You know,  Raymond Chandler in the guise of Philip Marlowe held the nitty gritty of life in the revolving cylinder of his typewriter. No one counts on religion in a Chandler novel. It won’t get you a free drink, nor will it keep you from getting murdered. You need your wits about you and a healthy enough cynicism to maneuver the dark corners of society where even beautiful flesh is usually nothing more than meat gone bad. You should read the two best, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely for the sleek pizzicato dialogue, where Marlowe, so full of contempt, blurts out acerbic one liners even with a gun held to his head. A bird doesn’t fly in a Chandler sentence; it comes by fast like a pitched stone. You should read Chandler instead of How to be a Good Writer in Ten Easy Chapters, or 100 Things Every Writer Should Know Before He Hits the Keyboard…

“I stood there looking at her, not saying anything, not thinking anything particular to say. I stepped over to her side after a moment and put the flat bottle, now almost empty, on the table at her side…She was staring down at the carpet. The radio droned pleasantly in the corner. A car went by outside. A fly buzzed in a window. After a long time she moved one lip over the other and spoke to the floor, a meaningless jumble of words from which nothing emerged. Then she laughed and threw her head back and drooled. Then her right hand reached for the bottle and it rattled against her teeth as she drained it. When it was empty she held it up and shook it and threw it at me. It went off in the corner somewhere, skidding along the carpet and banging up with a thud against the baseboard…She leered at me once more, then her eyes closed and she began to snore.”

I laugh out loud whenever I red this line. “I’m an occational drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.” –”The King in Yellow”