Nuts! or Why I Love Raymond Chandler

Ever since giving birth to Thorne, I've become a voracious reader of fiction. My latest literary conquests have been the Raymond Chandler oeuvre, the inimitable Philip Marlowe made famous by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (Chandler's first novel). Bogart has been one of my all time favorite old school Hollywood actors, but he is no Philip Marlowe. He was too old and too short to play the 6' 1/2"and 33 year old Marlowe of The Big Sleep. But, I digress. I can't believe I've waited this long to read a master of colorful description, crackling dialog, and and witty characterization. Nothing is more tedious to me than pages of description of the George Eliot variety, but in Chandler's hands description is tight and full of tasty bits. For example, here's Philip Marlowe describing a "bleach job" in the novel The Long Goodbye:

"She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed."

Here's another,

"She looked as if it would take a couple of weeks to get her dressed."

And another,

"There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays....There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial."

Addictive stuff is Chandler's writing. All his works are littered with these descriptive jems making it an absulute pleasure to read.

A note of warning: do not read his short stories first. Chandler recycled plots from his short stories into his novels and nothing is more disappointing than to settle in to devour a novel only to have already read 1/3 of it or more.