He wasn't just big. He was a giant. He looked seven feet high, and he wore the loudest clothes I ever saw on a big man.

Pleated maroon pants, a rough greyish coat with billiard-balls for buttons, brown suede shoes with explosions in white kid in them, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, a large red carnation, and a front door handkerchief in the colour of the Irish flag. It was neatly arranged in three points, under the red carnation. On Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, with that size and that make-up he looked as unobtrusive as a tarantula on a slice of angel-food cake.
-- Raymond Chandler, 'Try the Girl' -- from Killer in the Rain (a Chandler short story collection)


Apparently 'Try the Girl' along with another short story, 'Mandarin's Jade', formed the basis of Chandler's 1940 novel FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. He did this with a lot of his short story work, later turning it into successful novels. From the intro to the collection (ibid.), "He called the process 'canabalisation'."

"His method was a complex one. Sometimes he would use entire scenes, other times merely a few lines."

In fact, Chandler was so unapologetic about his pilfering of his own short stories (is it plagiarism if you're plagiarising yourself?) that he forbade the short stories from ever being re-published in his lifetime. They were first collected 5 years after he died.

This collection (which I want to call 'a funride through wit, with bullets') collects stories from 1935-41, from Black Mask and the delightfully named Dime Detective Magazine. It's like a book of one-liners that've been arm-wrestled together and fixed in place with a gun to the ribs.

The heroes are interchangeable (and of course form the basis for Chandler's Californian dick, Marlowe), the dames are emotionally self-victimising and/or drug dependent. And the men are assorted, but often tragic figures who've thrown it all away for love, and would again -- if only they'd live long enough.

Raymond Chandler. I ask you: what's not to love?