Carsblog

Monday, 12th of January, 2009 12:00 pm UTC

“He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel”

Not finding any more Rumpole at hand, lately, I’ve taken to reading two-fisted Raymond Chandler tales. It was hard to read anything through the holidays, but I finished his first book, The Big Sleep, and a novella called Trouble is My Business. (Is it OK for a tough guy to call a book a “novella”?)

Now, I’m midway through The Long Goodbye, which strikes me as the best of the three. Marlowe’s not quite so down on his luck (even though he suffers the mockery of a gangster ragging on him for being a “cheapie”--until he punches him in the gut) which puts the shamus in the position of being a good samaritan to hard luck cases.

The story begins not with a sleuth job, but an unusual chance relationship with a lost soul named Terry Lennox, a scarred, white-haired young man who seems lost at sea on the currents of life, and who is eventually cornered and killed in Tijuana, after fleeing murder charges against his wife.

And that appears to be just the beginning.