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Yes yes yes! Not one, but four stories with Philip Marlowe at the lead. I think Raymond Chandler is superb; his descriptions have me drooling and in my opinion he's the original hard boiled, film noir detective. I love him and every move he makes. He's witty, dry, sarcastic and dangerous. I can picture myself walking the streets at night with him, slugging a bad guy with a gun and swigging scotch in the middle of the night in a stifling hot hotel room whilst hiding from a crook. He's just an awe...
I prefer Chandler's novels as opposed to this four story collection. The stories felt too ephemeral and I would forget about each of them five minutes after I read it. On the bright side Raymond Chandler's prose is crisp and on point as always.
For my money, the first and lasts stories are best, the second and third only for Chandler purists. This is early Chandler, and rough in many places, but you can see him polishing parts of the stories and developing his unique style. 1. Trouble is My Business - 3.5 StarsThe first story starts off a bit roughly and overwritten, but even in this early effort we can see the Chandler-to-be. Marvellous. The tall one was grinning. He had his hat low on his forehead and he had a wedge-shaped face that...
This is a collection of 5 short stories from Raymond Chandler. It is identified as a part of the Philip Marlowe series, and other reviews identify the stories as all being about Marlowe. My copy however (1950 Penguin) contains a note which says "The stories in this volume first appeared in various magazines between 1933 and 1939..." and I suspect the characters names in my edition are the original, and have subsequently been republished as Marlowe.Trouble is my Business (John Dalmas) 5/5Red Wind...
4 Stars. "Trouble is My Business" is a collection of four novellas and novelettes, two each. It came out in 1950 and includes the title story, along with "The Finger Man," "Goldfish," and "Red Wind." Each is reviewed elsewhere. This is about the collection. Get ready for gambling, fast women, political corruption, theft, con artists, murder, and action galore in the under-belly of Los Angeles. Noir mystery and hard-boiled par excellence. The stories originally had other private detectives as the...
I think a review of the book would be pointless. Just know that this is one of the true headwaters of the River Noir. Anyone who reads Chandler would be well served to get a copy containing Chandler's own introduction (written around 1950) where he looks back at the pulps - which he refers to in the past tense even though they had about 10 more years left in them fighting for rack space -and discusses the transformation of the genre from the mostly British in style iterations to the fully Ameri
Four Pulp magazine novellas. Only one, Red Wind, had I read before. My favorite here is Goldfish (though it does contain some bad fish abuse). The introduction, writing about pulp writing, was done by Chandler in 1950.
I read Raymond Chandler for the language. The way he uses words is akin to magic. The opening to his short story "Red Wind," which is found in this collection of four, is iconic in detective fiction: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 an...
I bought this after reading reviews by my Goodreads friend, author James Thane. These old potboiler detective stories are so good!* * * * *Ha ha ha! What a delightful little book. The plot is secondary to the dialogue of Philip Marlowe and the other hardboiled characters, to wit:"I called him up from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.""I moved around slowly, like a cat in a strange house. . .""The room...
My first exposure to the works of Raymond Chandler in the form of his famous detective character, Philip Marlowe. This brief anthology explores the detective's career in four adventures first published in the old pulps in the 1930s. I'm not a huge fan of the genre but given Chandler's standing and his influence particularly in Hollywood in the 1940s and beyond I knew I needed to give it a go. The first story was the most long-winded and worst for me, full of jargon that couldn't help but put me
Review updated on 29.05.2017This is a collection of four short stories featuring Philip Marlowe, the cynical drinking PI who served a role model for all the PIs written after him - no exceptions.Trouble is my business. A rich man hired Marlowe to keep his good-for-nothing son from getting married to a woman whose sole interest in him was his money. This happens to be the first appearance of famous PI who is slightly rough around the edges and really likes to say the title phrase. Several dead bo...
To quote the man himself, Raymond Chandler’s stories are like alcohol, which is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second intimate, the third routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.I’ve read enough that I’ve reached a point where reading Raymond Chandler is like returning to a neighborhood bar you’ve haunted every Friday for more years than is worth counting.You don’t expect magic. You don’t expect excitement or novelty. In fact, it is the familiarity and routine that draw you
There's a lot of top notch story packed in these tasty little packages. Compared to Chandler's full length stories they're a bit short on Marlowe's sharply insightful and often somber self-reflections, but that's to be expected in a shorter format. Highly recommended for Chandler fans, but also a good place to start for those new to his masterful ministrations.Trouble is My Business (4.0) - A few too many tenuous plot strands and twists made this more difficult to follow than it should have been...
Raymond Chandler and I don't always have a happy relationship when his novels are put into consideration. I DNF-ed more of his books than managed to finish them in the past. I have to admit Mr. Chandler had a terrific way with writing, his dialogues and his tone are always charming and witty, but his stories can always be a struggle to get through.Now, with his short stories collection Trouble Is My Business mostly because these are all short stories so it takes Mr. Chandler's famous main charac...
Of course I love this, it being a collection of four short stories which were later cannibalized for Chandler's novels, but I admit I wanted it to be longer. The Simple Art of Murder had more stories and a bit more variety, so I definitely prefer it to this, but still, this was a good selection of short stories. Almost nothing outside of Chandler's works makes me imagine scenes in my head so vividly, or to laugh out loud at the sarcasm. I pretty much was laughing every few minutes while reading...
Quintessential noir by one of the creators of the genre. Private eye Phillip Marlowe is the archetype of those that followed. This book is four (rather long) short stories. All excellent.
There are just four stories, all in the 50-60 page range, all vintage Chandler. The cadence of the writing is perfect. In the wikipedia article on hardboiled crime fiction, Chandler's Philip Marlowe is the first of the half dozen named private detectives. Notable hardboiled detectives include Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Slam Bradley, and The Continental Op. I wonder that I haven't read any of the others, although I do have a Lew Archer waiting my attention.My favorite of
Although the four stories in this volume all feature Philip Marlowe, he is not quite yet the Marlowe of the novels -- but he is almost there. Raymond Chandler's Trouble is my Business is set in Los Angeles, with the detective living in Hollywood near Franklin Avenue. Thye best story by far is "Red Wind," which perfectly conveys the madness of our dry Santa Ana winds, when the wind blows in from the desert and pushes the smog off to sea, from where it soon comes tumbling back when the wind direct...
3.5 stars.It took me a few years living in Georgia to realize just how much California is in my bones. I grew up a Midwesterner but then spent 14 crucial years – 1995-2009, or age 22 to 36 – on the West Coast. I never made a conscious decision to self-identify as a Californian, but after living in the Atlanta area for a couple years I suddenly realized just how much my time in California had shaped my personality. And now, even though I’ve been in the South for nearly six years, no author takes