DBB meets Dolores Hitchens

I first read Dolores Hitchens while preparing for a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, the first of my Beyond Chandler and Hammett sessions focusing on lesser-known crime writers from the middle of the twentieth century. Hitchens will be among the subject of this year's version of the panel at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans next month, and this pre-Long Breach post captures nicely why I like these panels so much: I get to read, experience, and come to grips with authors new to me.

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A friend sent along Dolores Hitchens' 1955 novel Sleep With Strangers because of its setting in Long Beach, site of Bouchercon 2014. Indeed, the book is even more evocative of its setting than is that other great Long Beach crime novel, Paul Cain's Fast One.

Hitchens is new to me, so naturally I start out thinking of her in terms of other crime writers her work evokes, and those writers are two of the best.  Hitchens' compassion for characters who lead marginal existences reminds me of David Goodis, particularly The Street on the Corner [At this late date, I don't remember if I meant The Blonde on the Street Corner or The Street of No Return. The latter, I suspect.] and Cassidy's Girl, and her dissection of family life in California brings to mind The Big Sleep. (Ed Gorman's discussion of Sleeps With Strangers invokes Ross Macdonald. I've never warmed to Macdonald, but I suspect that what Gorman sees as Macdonaldish is what I see as Chandlerlike. In any case, that's another illustrious name associated with Hitchens.)

The novel's opening is an atmospheric, moody, tension-filled inversion of the usual scene in which a P.I. meets a client, and it hooked me on Hitchens right away. (The client is named Kay Wanderley.  "Wonderly," of course, is the name Brigid O'Shaughnessy uses when she first calls on Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Homage? Coincidence? Either way, it's more good fictional company for Dolores Hitchens.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014, 2016

Stupid blurb bait, thoughtless shorthand comparisons

A recent exchange with Benjamin Whitmer on social media included the following:

Nope, nothing like me.

"An invocation of [Raymond] Chandler in a crime fiction review is often more a reflex than it is a thought, like a knee jerk, a fart, or a belch." 

and

Me neither.

"[Cormac] McCarthy's almost one on his own now. I mean, I love him, but every damn book that's not set in a major city is McCarthyian." 

Now it's your turn: What authors are fatuously invoked by reviewers who lack the time or the brains to think about what they read? What is the silliest comparison to another author you have read in a view?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Too much of nothing: The High Window

The High Window has plenty of good stuff in it, but I know of no one who considers it among Raymond Chandler's best work. I'm part of that consensus, and here are some of the reasons, based on a recent rereading:

1) Chandler's inspiration flags.  In Chapter Four, needing to give Philip Marlowe and the reader information about the case at hand, Chandler has Marlowe call a friend who happens conveniently to be "a crime reporter on the Chronicle," a hard-boiled convention probably five to ten years out of date by the time The High Window appeared in 1942. The information is forthcoming, Marlowe and the crime reporter friend duly exchange mildly salacious wisecracks, and the reporter disappears, never to return.  The reporter's name suggests that Chandler was well aware of the scene's perfunctory nature: Kenny Haste.

2) The word nothing occurs 73 times in the novel, sometimes like a  self-mocking drumbeat: "Nothing in that, Marlowe," Marlowe tells himself, "nothing at all. Nothing for you here, nothing."  Chandler would engage in morbid crankiness in The Little Sister in 1949. Something similar may be at work in The High Window.

3) On a possibly related note, I detected what I would bet was the inspiration for Ross Macdonald's cringe-inducing pathetic fallacies in The Galton Case. In Macdonald, "Flowers bloomed competitively in the yards." In The High Window, "a small tiled pool glitter(ed) angrily in the sun." Is it fair to blame Chandler's mild excess for Macdonald's more serious sin? Maybe Chandler could be indicted as an accessory before the fact.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Story and voice: A post about The Big Sleep inspired by cold mutton fat

"She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn’t often seen in bookstores."

— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

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Haunted by John McFetridge's comment about voice and story here at Detectives Beyond Borders and consumed by desire to revisit the greatest mutton-fat simile in American crime writing, I read The Big Sleep again on Saturday.

McFetridge wrote "I think voice is really important in a story but not as important as the story," which sounds at once reasonable and at odds with the wisecracking American P.I. tradition that Raymond Chandler perfected for eternity. So I kept my eye on story this time, and McFetridge was right. The pathos of the story and the depth of the Sternwood family's pride and self-delusion get more affecting each time I read The Big Sleep.

Martha Vickers as Carmen
Sternwood in The Big Sleep's
best performance.

The novel also increased my wonder at Howard Hawks' celebrated 1945 and 1946 film adaptations. Aside from minor details of hair color and such, the performers — and the cast is a strong one — are dead ringers for Chandler's versions of them. And the movie's additions either are plausible extrapolations from the novel (the racy horse-racing dialogue between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart) or good, solid action in their own right (the end of Eddie Mars). My guess is that the former is due to the movie's writers, who included Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner, and the latter to director Howard Hawks.

Oh, and the novel's plot is less confusing than the movie's, if that matters.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Vera Caspary, and mysteries within mysteries

"(S)he was not fond of mystery stories. Nobody in them ever seems to feel sorry about murders, she had said. They're presented as a problem, m'dear, her father said. What's more, they generally show the murdered person as someone you can't waste any pity on. I'm sorry for them, she said. I hate it when they're found with daggers sticking in them and their eyes all staring from poison and things like that."

That's from Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel The Blank Wall, included in the new collection Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels in the 1940s and '50s, edited by Sarah Weinman for the Library of America.  That paragraph will catch the eye of readers today, I suspect, and it makes a good starting point for discussion of the entire collection. What makes these eight writers different from their predecessors? From their successors? From their male contemporaries?  What traits do the eight share with all those groups? It might also make for interesting comparison with Raymond Chandler's famous assessment of Dashiell Hammett's contribution to crime writing in "The Simple Art of Murder."

But it's not the funniest meditation on mystery stories in Women Crime Writers. That honor goes to Waldo Lydecker's narration in Chapter II of Vera Caspary's Laura:

"I have never stooped to the narration of a mystery story. At the risk of seeming somewhat less than modest, I shall quote from my own works. The sentence, so often reprinted, that opens my essay `Of Sound and Fury' is reprinted here:

"`When, during the 1936 campaign, I learned that the President was a devotee of mystery stories, I voted a straight Republican ticket.'"

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Sarah Weinman will discuss Elisabeth Sanxay Holding on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., in (yikes) two weeks. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," and it happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Dana King's Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, by Detectives Beyond Borders friend Dana King, is a tribute to The Maltese Falcon through and through, from its title, to one of its plot strands, to explicit references to Hammett's novel and the Bogart-Astor movie version.

That's pretty high-concept, or at least it would be had King not made a compelling, even touching story out of it.  King obviously loves The Maltese Falcon (Raymond Chandler, too), mid-century hard-boiled stories, their moral urgency, and their cultural legacy, and there is nothing jokey or campy about the tributes. He doesn't hammer home the Falconisms, either, instead just bringing them in when they advance the story.

And the tributes themselves are delightful, and delightfully clever, going beyond obvious plot parallels, famous lines, and explicit mentions and extending to appropriation of speech patterns, in some cases. I'll refrain from giving examples, so you can have the pleasure of discovering them yourself.

It's a kind of authorial magic that The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of works as a tribute and as a story, and that neither aspect interferes in the least with the other.
© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon

The third in Syndicate Books' reissues of Ted Lewis' three novels about Jack Carter is a bit like Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister: a lesser work marked in places by what I suspect are the author's complaints, in Chandler's case about his (presumed) disillusionment with Los Angeles, in Lewis' about art school.

Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977), the second of two prequels to Get Carter (original title Jack's Return Home), is less a fleshed-out novel than a set-up that never quite comes together: Carter is dispatched by his feckless bosses to their Spanish villa for a vacation that turns out to be a job minding a Mafia turncoat.  And that's about it, except for an orgy of violence at the end and some bits of comedy and cruelty on the way.

But some of the the bits are delicious, the funniest probably the arrival of the janitor/butler's daughter, the grimmest the treatment of the janitor/butler by everybody, his daughter included.  Read this book by all means, but after you've read Get Carter and Jack Carter's Law.

Ted Lewis

Here's Brian Greene on Lewis and why you should read him. And here is a slew of Lewis posts from Nick Triplow, who wrote an afterword for Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Ferdowsi is a bit like Max Allan Collins, too

Rostam rescues Bizhan from the pit,
from a 17th-century manuscript of
the Shahnameh, London, British Library

I've been reading Max Allan Collins' Quarry novels in preparation for a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon in November. I've also been reading the Shahnameh, Iran's national epic, a book in connection with which I invoked Raymond Chandler yesterday.

One of those books includes a sequence in which the hero falls for the wrong dame and winds up getting drugged, kidnapped, and imprisoned despite the following precaution:

"He always carried in his boot / A blue-steel dagger."

Can you guess where in my recent reading that's from? (Hint: The book was written in the 10th and 11th centuries.)

While you're doing that, join once again in a favorite Detectives Beyond Borders game, and name some great literature that shares elements with crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Persia's 10th- and 11th-century Raymond Chandler

If Hakim Abu ʾl-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi  (or Firdausi) had lived about 970 years later, and if he'd worked in Los Angeles rather than in a Turko-Persian Muslim dynasty, he might have rivaled Raymond Chandler for atmospheric beginnings:

'"The night was like jet dipped in pitch. there lent /
No planet lustre to the firmament /
The moon, appearing in her new array /
...
Through rust and dust she journeyed through the sky /
Night's retinue had spread out everywhere /
A carpet black as raven's plumes ... "

That's the beginning of "The Story of Bizhan and Manizha" from Iran/Persia's national epic the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), and it's a hell of a way of saying, "It was dark out." Think of it as a medieval Near Eastern counterpart to:

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”

And now, readers, what are your favorite depictions of night, or your favorite pieces of atmosphere in general, in crime fiction or otherwise?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

James Ellroy on Hammett, Chandler, America, and how young writers ought to act

James Ellroy's Paris Review interview from a few years ago contains a bit of advice that every young writer ought to call up on his or her smartphone immediately:

“[Ellroy] exhorted a class of aspiring screenwriters to quit smoking, get rid of their tattoos and piercings, and always address their elders as Mr. or Mrs. `Do this, and people will say to themselves, This kid knows his shit and understands that there is a social contract.'”

Also of note: Ellroy's  comment on why crime is important in American writing:

"We’re a nation of immigrant rabble. A great rebellion attended the founding of this republic. We’ve been getting into trouble for two-hundred-and-thirty-odd years. It’s the perfect place to set crime stories, and the themes of the genre—race, systemic corruption, sexual obsession—run rife here. In a well-done crime book you can explore these matters at great depth, say a great deal about the society, and titillate the shit out of the reader."

And his preference for Dashiell Hammett over Raymond Chandler:

"Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important 
to me."

One might disagree with Ellroy's choice, and one might argue that writing about what he wanted to be rather than what he was is the whole point of Chandler's writing: "Down these mean streets a man must walk who is not himself mean."  But I was relieved to see a Chandler vs. Hammett comparison based solely on the two authors' work, rather than on politics.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The great and the good, Part III

Raoul Whitfield's 1931 story "About Kid Deth" (that's not a spelling mistake. Deth, not death, is correct.) is as chilling and hard-edged as anything this side of his fellow Black Mask writers Paul Cain (Fast One) or Dashiell Hammett (The Glass Key). 

Whitfield's story takes its place alongside Cain's and Hammett's novels on my list of crime fiction written in the early 1930s that reads, entirely or in part,  as if it could have been written today.  But, like some of his colleague Frederick Nebel's writing, Whitfield's story is rife with verbal quirks that have dated badly and that keep its author out of the Hammett-Raymond Chandler pantheon. (Cain might be part of a hard-boiled Big Three had he written more than just Fast One and Seven Slayers.)

In "About Kid Deth," these quirks often take the form of periphrasis — a fancy, though scientifically and grammatically precise word for wordiness. Current preference in American English (and, damn it, in stories that come across my desk at work) calls for the car's engine rather than the engine of the car, the girl's body rather than the body of the girl. Not so in Whitfield's story.

Then there's Whitfield's weird penchant for the word tone. No one ever speaks bitterly in "About Kid Deth." No one ever says anything, his voice casual. No one ever speaks grimly or easily. Rather:

"She spoke in a low, bitter tone."

“`Hello, Deth,' he said in a casual tone."

“`Think so?' he said in a strange tone." [ed. note: What is "a strange tone"?]

"`You can’t—not that way,' he said in a hard tone."

“`At Old Andy’s,' he replied in a low tone."

"He said in an uncertain tone: `Watch what you do, Kid.'”

"He spoke in a low, easy tone."

"He said in a grim tone: `Yeah? Did he do that job?'”

By today's standards, that's the stuff of an early, rough draft. Then there's swearing. Publishing mores in the 1930s did not permit curse words, and the results can look odd to readers today, our eyes and ears assaulted by four decades of artistic and literary cursing. "The skunks!" exclaims a character in Nebel's Crimes of Richmond City, and a reader today can't help but smile.

Here's how Whitfield handles his era's prohibition on swearing:

"The Kid swore."

"Joey Deth lowered his hands and swore."

"Kid Deth swore."

"Rands swore hoarsely."

"He swore shakily."

"Then he sat back and swore softly and more steadily."

Granted, the brisk, monosyllabic swore conveys the right, er, tone for a hard-boiled story, but at the risk of a certain sameness. Chandler, on the other hand, turned the prohibition on swearing to entertaining, creative advantage in The Big Sleep in 1939, as Hammett had in "The Girl With the Silver Eyes" in 1924 — seven years before "About Kid Deth."

I may be lazily leftish in my politics, but I'm a cultural conservative in one respect: I believe in artistic discrimination and artistic standards, with absolute, if hard to define, differences between bad and good, and between good and great. Whitfield and Nebel are good, and worth seeking out today. Hammett and Chandler are great. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

OK, now WHO's great, and WHO is just very good?

Monday's post here at Detectives Beyond Borders speculated on what separates the greatest of crime writers from the merely very good. I cited, naturally, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as the greatest, with a suggestion that Paul Cain might have made it if he'd written more.

A couple of readers provided a couple of replies, but now come the hard part: WHO are the very greatest crime writers, musicians, artists, or what have you (and why?), and the even harder part: WHO are the very good, (and why?).

I nominated some of the top second-rank Black Mask writers, particularly Frederick Nebel, as very good, illustrating the discussion with some examples from Nebel's work and contrasting these with citations of how Hammett and Chandler had solved similar problems. Novelist and gauntlet-flinger Dana King provides a fine example (from the history of music). Now it's your turn.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What separates the superlatively great from the merely very good?

Frederick Nebel is like a great hamburger or pepperoni pizza; Dashiell Hammett is steak au poivre that melts in your mouth, followed by a fine aged tawny port. Raoul Whitfield is a Lexus, Raymond Chandler a Bugatti (though given Whitfield's output of aviation stories, maybe he's the Spirit of St. Louis and Chandler a Concorde). Hammett is Giotto and Chandler, Babe Ruth; George Harmon Coxe and Erle Stanley Gardner are—  But you get the idea.

I'm reading one of the superlatively great Black Mask writers, one who would be right up there if he'd written more, and one of the mere very goods. (The superlatively great is Hammett, the would-have-been is Paul Cain, and the very good is Frederick Nebel, in the form of Crimes of Richmond City, five loosely connected stories that appeared in Black Mask in 1928 and 1929.) 

The Nebel has great moments of tension and even psychological insight, and one of the great comic crime fiction foils in Kennedy, of the Free Press. It also has archaisms that induce a smile in today's readers:

"`The skunks!' exclaimed Kerr. `Can't we run the pups down?'"

or

"`Drive to that old brewery,' he clipped."

It won't do simply to chalk up the first example to its era's greater reticence than our own with respect to swearing. Chandler in The Big Sleep and Hammett in "The Girl With the Silver Eyes" devised entertaining, evocative ways to suggest swearing without the archaically comical touch of "The skunks!" Perhaps one definition of greatness in a writer is the ability to solve narrative problems in ways that would not occur to lesser authors, and to turn those problems to his or her advantage. So here is your philosophical question, readers: What distinguishes a great author from one who is merely good, even very good? Examples welcome.

(Granted Nebel was near the start of what would be a prolific career that lasted into the 1960s. He may have lacked the confidence or the juice to blaze creative trails early on. But Hammett was still in his twenties when "Arson Plus" appeared and barely 30 when he wrote "The Secret Emperor.")

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Kevin Starr, film noir, crime fiction, and (California) history

Kevin Starr's California will make my books-of-the-year list if I prepare one, and I can hardly wait to finish this one-volume history so I can start on his seven-volume version, each book of which has the word dream in its title.

Starr is a passionate, engaging writer and a great lover of California, which he served as state librarian. Yet he is fair-minded in dealing with the violence that has attended the on-going birth of this strange piece of the planet. He is the sort who can give history a good name.

He's also savvy enough to tie the state's raucous, dream-filled history to the crime writing that arose there. (It's no accident that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler lived in California and set some of their most celebrated work there.) Starr makes the connection during a discussion of a period perhaps surprisingly early: the 1870's and 1880s, when promoters touted California as an El Dorado of health. After citing examples of recovery from consumption and other complaints, Starr notes that:

"Many. however, lost their struggle for health and succumbed, and this drama of hope and defeat conferred upon Southern California a certain interplay of healthfulness and morbidity that in various forms, including the hard-boiled detective story and film noir, would persist into the mid-twentieth century."

Elsewhere California history is filled with colorful episodes and characters: the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856. The settlement during California's American period of land claims dating from its Spanish and Mexican eras ("That meant that lawyers got rich.") Great engineering feats, but also environmental depredations. (Starr mentions Chinatown in a discussion of the mammoth problems that attended getting water to San Francisco and Los Angeles.) And that's just a few decades.   Some of California's prospectors and health seekers were doomed disappointment, but crime writers looking for material struck it rich.

What can match California as a location for crime stories, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Santa Monica noir, or Nighttime at the heister's hideaway

That's the beach in Santa Monica (all photos by your humble blogkeeper).  It is not to be confused with the icy steps I salted down when I got back home to Philadelphia this evening.  While I wallow in self-pity, here are some superlatives from the Los Angeles leg of my trip:

1) Most evocative Raymond Chandler destination: A tie between Laurel Canyon and the Baldwin Hills oilfields. Or maybe the "Lido" Pier.

2) Best place to eat: The Astro Burger at Melrose and Gower.

3) Most heartening blend of artifacts, history, pop culture, and cultural sensitivity in a museum exhibition: "Junípero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions" at the Huntington. This exhibit on the life and work of the Spanish missionary who worked in Mexico on his way to setting up the mission system in California offers the basics about Serra's fascinating life. The man was one hell of a traveller, among other things. It also offers entertaining examples of the cultural kitsch that ensued once the missions caught the popular imagination, as well as a section on the California Indian tribes among whom Serra evangelized. Traditional history, pop culture, and cultural diversity co-exist in a harmony almost unimaginable amid the shrill, deafening, witless clamor that passes for cultural discourse in America.

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This is the motel/motor court off the Pacific Coast Highway where I'd hole up if I were a desperate man on the run for something he didn't do. Lush scenery. Cabins set back from the Pacific Coast Highway. I bet heisters waiting for the heat to cool down or for their new faces to heal have the place booked years in advance.

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And now, as sands through an hourglass, so are the days of our vacations. One good thing about being back from this trip is that I can begin planning my next one.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Down this mean street a man walked ...

Raymond Chandler's home at 6520 Drexel Ave, 
photo by your humble blogkeeper, information 
from Shamustown

... from October 1944 to 1946, when he worked for Paramount studios.  6520 Drexel Avenue is one of many places Raymond Chandler lived in and around Los Angeles. Visit Shamustown for the complete list.

This is the Malibu Pier, which Chandler turned into the Lido Pier in The Big Sleep. Remember when Marlowe gets called down to the pier to watch General Sternwood's Packard fished out of Santa Monica Bay with Owen Taylor in it? It happened here.

At right, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, which appears in The Long Goodbye as the Ritz-Beverly. Dashiell Hammett also lived here from October 1934. Sounds like a pilgrimage site to me.

More to come!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Los Angeles daily views

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Hiking up Assisi's medieval streets to the Rocca Maggiore years ago, I imagined Dante taking the same path 700 years before and being inspired to write the Inferno: Narrow streets, the night patch black, my way lit only by the blue glare of televisions from inside the ancient houses.

I felt something like that driving through Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon yesterday: Houses perched on hill tops, ready to tumble down on passing tourists, vistas of stunning beauty that plunge suddenly into the darkness, and, of course, winding roads populated by incautious drivers.

It's not a route calculated to induce tranquility, and I can well understand why Raymond Chandler has the pornographer Arthur Gwynne Geiger live up there in The Big Sleep. The only trouble is that the narrow streets afford few opportunities for leisurely photography, so some of these pictures come from the more expansive precincts of the Griffith Park Observatory or other flatter, straighter parts of town.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Crime fiction at the Art Institute of Chicago, plus a question for readers

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper, 1942.
Oil on canvas, 84.1 x 152.4 cm, 33.125 x 60 in Art Institute of Chicago

"Just then we had another customer. A car squeaked to a stop outside and the swinging door came open. A fellow came in who looked a little in a hurry. He held the door and ranged the place quickly with flat, shiny, dark eyes. He was well set up, dark, good-looking in a narrow-faced, tight-lipped way. His clothes were dark and a white handkerchief peeped coyly from his pocket and he looked cool as well as under a tension of some sort. I guessed it was the hot wind. I felt a bit the same myself only not cool.

"He looked at the drunk's back. The drunk was playing checkers with his empty glasses. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of half-booths at the other side of the place. They were all empty. He came on in-down past where the drunk sat swaying and muttering to himself-and spoke to the bar kid.

"`Seen a lady in here, buddy? ...'"

— Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

Statue of the God Horus as a Falcon,
Egypt, Ptolemaic period (335-30 BC),
Art Institute of Chicago

"`Well, what did he say?' she asked with half-playful petulance.

"`He offered me five thousand dollars for the black bird.'"

— Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

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I saw the art; I thought of the writing. But the purest piece of crime fiction here at the Art Institute of Chicago tells a story by itself, no outside writing needed.

The artist: Goya. The paintings: Friar Pedro and El Maragato. The series of six small pictures gives us Friar Pedro (a Gerry Kells or Tough Dick Donahue for his time) foiling, disarming, and shooting the bandit El Margato. The bandit threatens the friar, the friar wrestles the bandit, clubs him with a gun, shoots him, and ties him up.

Friar Pedro Offers Shoes to El Maragato and Prepares
to Push Aside His Gun, Francisco José de Goya
y Lucientes. 1806, Oil on panel, 11.5 x 15.75 in.
(29.2 x 38.5 cm) Art Institute of Chicago

And you know the stock hard-boiled scene where the hero contemplates and analyzes his chances of distracting then jumping the bad guy so he can take away his gun? A thousand crime writers have written the scene in this century and the last one. Goya painted it in 1806.

What works of art have made you think: Wow, that's a crime story!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013 

A tale of three cities, or: No crime fiction, please; this is Philadelphia

Since I'll soon be in Chicago for a few days and then Los Angeles, this is a good time to bring back an old post about Chicago's decision a few years ago to honor Raymond Chandler, who was born there, though he will be forever associated with Los Angeles. That post, in turn, reminds of another I made about the high-mindedness of my own city's One Book ... program. No Chandler or Hammett or David Goodis here; this is Philadelphia.

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 Julia Buckley is one of several bloggers to note Chicago's decision to feature Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye in its One Book, One Chicago program, complete with discussions, readings, seminars, screenings and other events of various kinds.

A number of American cities run similar programs under such names as "One City, One Book", and I've never felt entirely comfortable with the concept. Why? Because I'm not sure uniformity of reading choices or of anything else is a good thing. Even the slogan "One City, One Book" has disquieting historical overtones, unintended though they may be. Still, Chandler is a refreshingly unhigh-minded choice, for which Chicago deserves a hearty clap between its broad shoulders.

All right, readers, you've just been elected mayor of the municipal jurisdiction where you live. What's your choice for One City, One (Suggested) Crime Book?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008/2013

"He was a bald-headed man of no particular age ..." or What's your favorite line?

This post's title comes from Raymond Chandler's story "Nevada Gas," which you should never read before getting in the back seat of a car unless you are absolutely sure the windows and the door handles work. The complete passage follows:

"De Ruse half-closed his eyes and watched the croupier's fingers as they slid back across the table and rested on the edge. They were round, plump, tapering fingers, graceful fingers. De Ruse raised his head and looked at the croupier's face. He was a bald-headed man of no particular age, with quiet blue eyes. He had no hair on his head at all, not a single hair."

I've never seen that passage on the lists of famous Chandler quotations, and I don't know why. Maybe the compilers of such lists are more familiar with Chandler's novels than with his short stories. The passage does at least as much to set a mood as the opening to "Red Wind," but how does it do what it does?

How about that juxtaposition of plump and graceful, two words not generally associated? How about no particular age,  without qualification or modification, no "appeared to be," no "He could have been thirty, or he could have been sixty"?  Or the intensifying not a single hair after Chandler has already told us the croupier is bald? Surprising? Yep. Dreamlike? Otherworldly? Maybe. As good as blondes and bishops and stained-glass windows? I'd say yes.

What's your favorite Chandler line? And why? Or choose a memorable line by another author, and tell my why you like it.

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(Blogger's spellcheck program is politically correct with respect to what its designers would probably call gender, but is really sex.  It flagged as a misspelling blondes two paragraphs above. I wonder if the simps who wrote the program would come up with a more gender-approprate name for one of Bob Dylan's most ambitious and celebrated albums.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013