→ December 15, 2010
→ By

The Little Sister.

I’m back at mental_floss today with an article about the designing of the game Dominion, based on an email exchange I had with designer Donald X. Vaccarino.

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“Do you drink, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Well, now that you mention it–”
“I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.”
“Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe isn’t just hard-boiled – he’s dry, sarcastic, self-effacing, and mercurial, making him one of the most compelling protagonists I’ve found in any novel in any genre. Consigning Chander’s novels to the detective-fiction bin does him a great disservice, as his greatness is in his mastery of the language; not only is the prose itself readable and rich with metaphor, but it becomes the tool by which Chandler creates well-rounded characters through a handful of seemingly effortless lines.

I understand that The Big Sleep is considered Chandler’s best work, and it is phenomenal … but there’s little to no difference between that and Farewell, My Lovely, or the work I just finished over the weekend, The Little Sister. They’re all superb, all following the basic Chandler template of putting Marlowe in a situation where the line between solving the case and saving his life is blurry.

In The Little Sister the titular character – quoted above – shows up in Marlowe’s office, asking the gumshoe to help find her older brother, who has disappeared in Bay City not long after leaving his family in Manhattan, Kansas. Marlowe takes the case against his better judgment (S.O.P. for him), even though he believes the girl is holding back information. With a modest amount of investigating, Marlowe ends up in the middle of a blackmail scheme, a dope ring, and a lot of questionable identities – something Chandler creates in his usual economical way, with just a handful of new characters outside of a few corpses.

I picked the wrong time to read The Little Sister by starting it on day one of the winter meetings, which left me very little time to actually read the book until the meetings ended on Thursday – frustrating when it’s a book you never want to put down in the first place. I found it moved more quickly than The Big Sleep, but the plot was a little less complex – it was relatively easy to figure out what most of the characters were up to, and I say that as someone who almost never figures things out in books – so the question of which is the better book is one of personal taste. (It’s possible that The Big Sleep enjoys its status at the top of Chandler’s canon because of its film adaptation, directed by Howard Hawks with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe.) No matter where you start, though, if you haven’t given Chandler at least one shot, I can’t recommend his work highly enough.

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→ February 28, 2009
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The Simple Art of Murder.

Playing catchup on the reading list a bit here … Raymond Chandler, one of my favorite authors in any genre, wasn’t an especially prolific writer; he published nothing until he was in his forties and his total output was seven completed novels and (according to this Chandler bibliography) 25 short stories, some of which he expanded into novels years after they were published in pulp magazines. The Simple Art of Murder includes eight of his short stories as well as his famous essay from Atlantic Monthly that gave the collection its title. That essay is a spirited defense of the detective story as a literary art form while also serving as a criticism of the degeneration of the genre through what Chandler seems to have considered hack writing, including contrived plot details and unrealistic motives.

The short stories seemed to lack the crisp writing and brisk pacing of the Chandler novels I’ve read, but the constant change of detective characters and milieus means that if you like the genre at all, you’ll probably find a story in the collection that hits all the high notes for you. It’s more a matter of taste than quality, but I enjoyed “Pearls Are a Nuisance” with its main detective’s stilted language and light parody of bad detective stories, and the closing story, “Nevada Gas,” which had a faster pace, higher stakes, and a slightly more intricate plot than any of the other stories. None of them can match The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye for character or tension, so if you’re new to Chandler I’d recommend you start with those novels and save Murder for later.

Worth checking out: The Raymond Chandler fansite I mentioned above is the best resource I’ve seen on his works. You can read the full text of the essay “The Simple Art of Murder.”

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 23, 2008
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Foyle’s War.

Many readers here and at ESPN.com have recommended various TV series to me, notably The Office and The Wire, so I’m going to return the favor by recommending a series that you’ve probably never seen. It’s a British series called Foyle’s War, and it might just be my favorite TV series ever.

Foyle’s War doesn’t fit the description of a typical American television series. Each episode is 100 minutes long, which in the U.S. would make it either a movie or a “very special episode.” The show, which just finished its sixth and final season in the UK, has just nineteen episodes in total. It’s bleak, set in the southern English town of Hastings during the early years of World War II, with such topics as the Blitz, German fifth column elements, biological warfare, and anti-German/anti-Italian sentiment all coming into play. And everything about the show is understated, almost magically so.

I’ve watched my share of American crime dramas – God knows we have a few of them – and the one trait they all have in common is the gotcha. Each hour is broken up into six or seven segments (separated by commercial breaks of unendurable length), and each segment ends with some sort of “Gotcha!” moment – a big twist, a sudden discovery, or just some deus ex machina event of critical evidence just falling into the investigators’ laps. If you love that style of show, Foyle’s War will seem slow in comparison. The stories, while complex, are writ small, with the title character, Deputy Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, unraveling mysteries by uncovering minor details and using them to guide his next interrogation. It’s so subtle that it could probably never work as an American series, even if a writer could successfully transplant its setting to our shores.

The superb plotting is enhanced by the incredible performances of Michael Kitchen as DCS Foyle. The writers have gifted him with an economy of words, and he maximizes their impact through small gestures and facial expressions, as well as a classically English way of delivering a cutting remark to ensure that it breaks the skin. Never has a television character uttered the words “Is that so?” to such devastating effect.

In addition to purchasing the first season on DVD via the link above, you can get the first five seasons (four DVD sets) via Netflix. There’s also a great Foyle’s War fansite (with its own updates blog) if you’re looking for more detailed info on the series.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , , ,
→ August 25, 2007
→ By

Don’t Look Back.

Reader Abel Wang was kind enough to first recommend and then lend me a copy of Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back, a straightforward detective novel that won the Glass Key Award for the best detective novel written by an author from any of the five Nordic countries.

Don’t Look Back is a very quick read, and I knocked it off in a few subway trips over a 24-hour period in New York City. The main character, Chief Inspector Konrad Sejer, isn’t the hard-boiled type I like most (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade), but is more of a stoic without a strong personality trait to define him. He’s a young widower and a grandfather, and both characteristics bring some touches of humanity to his approach to this particular case, but given that he’s the central character and now has appeared in a series of detective novels that followed this one, he could use something to set his character apart.

The story is set in a small Norwegian town, where a fifteen-year-old girl is found dead near a lake, her body naked except for an anorak laid on top of her. What set this novel apart from most mass-market detective books was the gradual unfolding of the back story behind the victim and behind the various suspects and witnesses Sejer and his partner Skarre interrogate. Most pulp detective novels today unfurl the story in a small number of very large discoveries, wow moments that seem more designed for a film adaptation or just to shock the reader into feeling excited. Fossum instead brings out the details slowly, in small doses, often presenting them as facts without immediate relevance, which strikes me as a lot more realistic and is definitely a lot less contrived.

Fossum also manages to fold in small details about characters who ultimately have nothing to do with the resolution of the main mystery, but whose interactions with Sejer lead to something small further down the line – for example, when he interviews a Turkish family that has had some trouble assimilating into the community, the father offers a suggestion for Sejer’s eczema … and several chapters later, in an offhand sentence, it appears that Sejer has followed his advice, implying even that Sejer went to the family’s store to pick up the folk remedy in question.

This subtle, fine-pointed approach has an obvious downside, which is that readers used to the big wow are going to find the book dull and the climax anticlimactic. That approach felt a lot more real to me than the constant crescendos of the typical detective novel and of the typical TV crime drama, and I enjoyed the way Fossum depicted Sejer slowly gaining understanding through diligence and through dialogues with his partner. While I prefer the stylings of Hammett and Chandler, for a more contemporary and straightforward detective story, Don’t Look Back was right in line with what I like to read.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ April 27, 2007
→ By

Cortázar, Hammett, and a nonfiction book.

Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is a bizarre novel; the first 56 chapters represent a complete work, a single story with a single protagonist and enough pseudo-intellectual pablum to make this Virginia Woolf hater want to light the book on fire. The last third of the book comprises interstitial chapters which may be added to the story proper if the reader wants to read the longer work. A few relate to the main narrative, a few more are of the newspaper-clipping style seen in a lot of other works, but most are just nonsense. The book is quite acclaimed – someone named C.D.B. Bryan is quoted as saying it’s his favorite novel, although why I’m supposed to take the opinion of a man with three initials in place of a first name seriously I have no idea – but it was a slog, and even slowed down towards the end. The core storyline is somewhat directionless, and doesn’t really conclude in any conventional sense; the main character needs a smack upside the head, both to get him to stop talking nonsense and to get him to do something with his life. The “freewheeling adventures” promised on the book’s jacket don’t even begin until the book is two-thirds finished, and they’re not freewheeling, not terribly adventurous, and are by and large extremely boring. (Exception: a bit of chapter 51, where the main character begins working at an asylum, a scene which sparks a few laughs.) So I wouldn’t exactly recommend this one.

Cleaning up a few books I read in March: Dashiel Hammett’s The Thin Man doesn’t exactly need my recommendation. Hammett’s one of my favorite authors, with a spare style that conveys so much more than Hemingway’s more-praised sparseness (which often struck me as a bit sing-song). That said, I’d probably send Hammett first-timers The Maltese Falcon, and for readers who want a lot of action I’d recommend Red Harvest. The Thin Man is best-known for the characters it introduced to the world, Nick and Nora Charles, but the book didn’t have quite the same tension as the other two I mentioned.

Ingrid Rowland’s The Scarith of Scornello was a fun, short read, telling the true story of a simple hoax orchestrated by a teenager in 16th-century Tuscany that turned into an elaborate academic fraud and ended up altering the course of the kid’s entire life. It’s billed as a bit of a mystery, which it isn’t, because the back cover of the book tells you that the whole thing was a hoax, and it turns out that some of the teenager’s contemporaries knew it was a hoax all along, while others were more than happy to believe in artifacts that appeared to increase the glory of their region in ancient times.

Filed Under: Literature, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,