Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/22/raymond-chandler-is-the-once-a.html
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Damn it, that last line really set the hook. I guess I’m doing some reading.
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He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled.
Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I’d ever heard of.
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Not an opening line, but to me a perfect distillation of what makes Chandler so great, from The Big Sleep: “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.”
It’s perfect pulp — cheesy as hell, so affectedly disaffected, and still makes you do a double-take.
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He also wrote, in eighteen words, a description that conveyed more about how a intensely attractive a character was than any exposition could by giving actual details about their features:
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
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That’s the shame with literature- there are great reads that are hard to translate well. Meaning, rhythm- it seems challenging. I know I’m missing out on a lot.
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The opening of The Big Sleep, Chandler’s first novel:
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
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One of my best friends earned a PhD in literature after being inspired by Chandler as a teenager. He considered Chandler to be more of a poet than a novelist.
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I can’t read that Red Wind paragraph without hearing Lou Grant’s voice.
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I think my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips may have been the ones in which Calvin imagines himself to be a Raymond Chandler character.
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Also worth considering: James Crumley, whose opening sentence to The Last Good Kiss should be required reading for every writer.
“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
He was inspired by Chandler, of course – it changed the trajectory of his work and style.
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Early 20th century detective stories, you say? @SeamusBellamy
You can pick up a whole mess of the reprints, two stories each, for $5 each here:
https://www.budsartbooks.com/ has them for $6 each and has the newer issues.
Nearly the entire original pulp run is now in easy to find reprints, other than a handful of of stories that didn’t get a reprint due to the license suddenly getting pulled.
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So those Santa Anas – which I only know from Crazy Ex Girlfriend – really do set people on edge, eh?
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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.
How about a list of books to help me forget what’s going on all around me, instead?
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I thought of Red Wind the second I saw your headline 
Not only opening sentences though - also novel closers:
“What’ll we drink to?” said (the cop).
“Let’s just drink”.
(Or the marvellous ending paragraph of The Big Sleep, which far more far outshines the oft-cited opening)
And character descriptions (as already noted):
He had on a bright canary-yellow shirt, open wide at the neck, which it had to be if his head was going to get out.
Disclaimer, these are from memory and likely not 100% right.
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My exposure started with OTR. Radio shows were my introduction to Chandler.
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Hey, the dude as a deformity with a huge nose. Easier said than done!
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