“… enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick.” “Three dizzy-looking dames… all cigarettes and arched eye-brows and go-to-hell expressions.” The writing of Chandler is entertaining and lovingly cliché-free it’s as if he searches for an ever-new cliché, uses it and immediately abandons it… Characters with suggestive names: Eddie Prue, Jesse Breeze, Spanglet, and Linda Conquest – not unlike character’s names of Charles Dickens: Herbert Pocket, Charles Cheeryble, Bumble, and Mercy Pecksniff. The whole face was a trained face, a face that would know how to keep a secret, a face that held the effortless composure of a corpse in the morgue.”Īll his characters are opportunists, if not after a quick buck, a quick fix, or a hook-up, they’re looking for gaps in your defense, eager to win a point, even if only for a little self-esteem. He had a long nose that would be into things. His ears were large and might have flapped min a high wind. Greenish eyes stared under orange eyebrows. He had a long narrow head packed with shabby cunning. “He was a lanky man with carroty short hair growing down to a point on his forehead.
This is paramount in Chandler’s work: descriptions of people are all about physiognomy – the angle if a chin, clothes – the cut of a dress, gives clues to personalities, behaviour, and what might make them either smile at you or shoot you in the back. Unlike a third-person god-like narrator who knows everything, what people think and what they want including what will happen in the future, a first person narrator only knows what’s going on in their own head, and relies on what is seen, heard and felt to give clues to character’s motives and wishes. Most crime fiction is written in the first person, which has its limitations. The plot revolves around a rare, valuable and stolen coin, The Brasher Doubloon a cranky client, two corpses, a wimpy son, wise-cracking dames, lazy police and nasty rich men.
It’s an escapist adventure into a strange world, almost filmic, where our fundamental assumptions are always confirmed: good, even if a little muddy, wins in the end. Reading crime fiction is not only about who done it. Genres are more important to booksellers as signposts to help readers find what they might enjoy. Writers don’t think too much about genre writers write what interests them. British-American crime writer, Raymond Chandler
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