“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep is a classic of mystery, a classic of noir, and even a classic of American literature. Published in 1939, it’s the first novel in which author Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) featured his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and it set the stage for the Marlowe novels that followed. The novel was also the basis for the 1946 film of the same namestarring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. 

Marlowe, a private detective, is hired by ailing General Sternwood to find out why a blackmailer is asking for money concerning one of his daughters. Sternwood made in money in the Southern California oilfields; his estate even includes pumping well (tastefully hidden from view of the palatial house). His son-in-law also seems to have disappeared, but no one seems terribly concerned about it. Marlowe is told to stick to the blackmail request.

 

The private detective makes use of clues and his many contacts to track the blackmailer to what appears to be a rare and antique book shop but is a front for a lucrative pornography business. Marlowe soon finds himself sucked into the Los Angeles underworld of pornography, gambling, violence, missing witnesses, and the glamour that disguises all of it.

 

Raymond Chandler

Marlowe is a fascinating detective. An outstanding graduate of the hardboiled detective school, he uses his tough-guy, no-nonsense exterior to harbor democratic ideals and a desire for good to triumph. He’s often compelled to chase down a wrong that’s been done, even when his employer tells him not to. It often leads to another feature of the ambiguousness of the culture highlighted in The Big Sleep – where the good buys and bad guys frequently change places.

 

Chandler’s Philip Marlowe’s novels also include Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953), and Playback (1958). He also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter, writing the scripts for such movies as Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia, and Strangers on a Train. Many of his short stories were published as collections. He died in 1959 at La Jolla, California. 

 

The Big Sleep is one of the milestones of American mystery fiction. It occasionally included descriptions and terms that were commonly used in the 1930s and 1940s but would cause many readers to wince today. But it’s a fascinating read, opening a window on life and culture in southern California at the time and giving us one of the great hardboiled detectives of American mystery fiction.

Related:

 

Dispatch No. 1: Raymond Chandler – Ameria Friedline at Dispatches to Jack.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Why conservatives should read more fiction – Daniel Pitt at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Sixties Never Happened – Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage.

 

Surrender town: An 1881 visit to Appomattox Court House – John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

 

Lifetime Reader – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Sloane Square, the Bloody Bridge and King’s Private Road – A London Inheritance.

Top photograph: A scene from the 1946 movie with Bogart and Bacall.

"A Deadly Act" by Jonathan Dunsky

It’s 1951 Tel Aviv. Israel’s War for Independence is four years past, and the Holocaust of World War II a few years older, but both events loom large in the new country’s everyday life. They also loom large in the life of private investigator Adam Lapid. 

Lapid had been a police detective in Budapest until 1944, when the German army moved in and took over the country. Lapid, his wife, his daughters, and more than 400,000 other Hungarian Jews are loaded onto cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. His wife and daughters died on the day of arrival. Lapid is one of the few who survived. Before emigrating to Israel, he spends two years traveling around Germany, murdering Nazis who believed they had successfully evaded war crimes.

He arrives in Israel just in time for the War for Independence. He joins the Israeli army and becomes a national hero for his almost suicide-like mission that saved his company. He also nearly dies but is carried to safety and army doctors by his best friend. After he recovers, and after the war is over, Lapid becomes a private investigator based in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv of the early 1950s is a noir kind of city, with nearly every citizen a minor criminal for evading rationing. And some citizens do far worse – smuggling, fraud, corruption, and murder.

Jonathan Dunsky

Lapid is hired by a stage actress who was once famed for her performances but now almost a cripple after receiving serious injuries in a hit-and-run accident. She wants him to prove that her husband, a stage actor and director, murdered an actress five years before. She believes he’s the murderer in the unsolved crime because she lied to give him an alibi. The cold case looks almost unsolvable, and the police aren’t exactly happy with Lapid for attempting to do what they couldn’t. But he finds a loose thread here, a slender lead there, and soon the private eye is unraveling a carefully orchestrated series of crimes. He’s also putting his own life at risk.

A Deadly Act is the fifth Adam Lapid mystery novel by Israeli author Jonathan Dunsky. It’s a solid, often mesmerizing evocation of a place and time almost 70 years in the past. It fits well in the tradition of noir mysteries, where almost every character carries a past they’d rather forget and you never know when a gun will be fired or a knife thrown. And it explores the theater in Israel’s early modern history.

The first four Adam Lapid mysteries are Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist, and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; the short story “The Unlucky Woman,”and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

Like the good noir novel that it is, A Deadly Act throws one twist and turn after another. It’s a story where the facts keep changing, and no one is who they appear to be.

Related:

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Dead Sister by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Auschwitz Violinist by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of A Debt of Death by Jonathan Dunsky.

“The Auschwitz Violinist” by Jonathan Dunsky

It’s a chance meeting. Private investigator Adam Lapid bumps into a man he knew at Auschwitz, a violinist who played in the orchestra the Nazis had at the death camp. It’s Tel Aviv, 1950, and it’s not unusual to see people you once assumed had been murdered in the camps. 

The violinist invites Adam to hear a performance he’s given at a bar, and Adam goes. The music is haunting, not only for Adam but for the other patrons as well. Afterward, they part, with a promise to getting together again. 

And then Adam finds out that, when he arrived home, the violinist committed suicide. The bar owner asks Adam to look into it, because the idea of suicide makes no sense in this case. As Adam starts, everything points to suicide. Only it points two well to suicide. Adam finds a letter in the man’s mailbox from a friend in Jerusalem. He visits there, only to learn that the friend had also committed suicide. And the friend had also been a musician in the Auschwitz orchestra. 

It turns out to be murder. Two, in fact. And then Adam finds a third.

Jonathan Dunsky

The Auschwitz Violinist by Israeli writer Jonathan Dunsky is the third in the Adam Lipid detective series, and it’s a dandy story. Dunsky combines Israeli modern history, the horrors of the Holocaust, and a hardboiled cynical detective hero to create a story and a series that are riveting and difficult to put down (I failed to put it down, reading it straight through). 

The four Adam Lapid mysteries are Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist; and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

Reading The Auschwitz Violinist has further confirmed me as an Adam Lapid fan. My problem is that I read them faster than Dunsky can write them.

Related:

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Dead Sisterby Jonathan Dunsky.

“The Bridesmaid” by Tom Darin Liskey

Maximiliano Santillan is a private investigator. He was once a policeman, a very good policeman, in fact. But he made the career mistake of testifying against a crooked cop, who was wrongly acquitted. Santillan was banished to a remote post. He’s now a private eye, and he’s worried about his daughter and her involvement with drugs.

Then comes the call – from a former police associate. He’s told virtually nothing except to meet the car being sent to get him. He’s taken to what looks like a police raid on a brothel, except there are no television cameras or reporters or even onlookers as is common with police raids. Inside, he sees policeman gathering and counting wads of counterfeit money. And there’s a dead woman, the death badly staged to look like a heroin overdose. 

Tom Darin Liskey

The woman turns out to be the adopted daughter of the former admiral rumored to be the next head of government. Santillan’s mission: find out who killed her. Even if the admiral doesn’t want to know.

The Bridesmaid by Tom Darin Liskey is a novella set in a country that sounds very much like Argentina, complete with a former military junta that “disappeared” thousands of people and was brought down by a war over control of islands in the South Atlantic. That history looms large in the story, demonstrating that the past is never really the past, that it’s always with us.

For almost 10 years, Liskey worked as a journalist in South America. His stories, articles, and photographs have been published in such magazines and journals as Crime Factory, Driftwood Press, Mount Island, Biostories, Hobo Camp Review, Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, and others. 

The Bridesmaid falls into the category of noir mysteries, and it’s exceedingly well done. Liskey sets the atmosphere and the characters just right for this story, and adds a few twists and turns involving a disfigured war hero and an activist nun. My only regret is that it wasn’t a full-length novel; perhaps the author can be prevailed upon to write more Santillan stories.

Related:

My review of This Side of the River by Tom Darin Liskey.

“The Dead Sister” by Jonathan Dunsky

It’s not every day that a man who was fighting to destroy you a year ago asks you to help find who killed his sister. Private investigator Adam Lapid, who had fought heroically in Israel’s War for Independence in 1947-48, is confronted with that request. So much for enjoying your coffee at Greta’s Café in downtown Tel Aviv.

Jonathan Dunsky

The client is an Arab; the police suspect his older brothers may have killed the young woman as part of the family’s honor code. She had fallen in love with a Christian, who was more instrested in a short-term fling. The brothers likely killed the Christian but have adamantly denied killing their sister, since someone got to her before they could. Lapid undertakes the job, and soon finds himself dodging pimps and the henchmen; low-life types who haunt seedy hotels; threatening police officers; and his own nightmares about Auschwitz, where his wife, children, and family died in 1944.

The Dead Sister is the second novel in the Adam Lapid mystery series by Israeli author Jonathan Dunsky. It’s a fast-paced, action-packed novel, and a fine example of the mystery sub-genre of Israeli noir. Dunsky advances Lapid’s personal story as well, and we learn about what happened at Auschwitz (to his family and himself) and how it’s left him a man fundamentally broken. 

In The Dead Sister, Dunsky tells a grabber of a good story, mixing period politics, the violence of organized crime, and a private detective who still can’t come to terms with the loss of his family in the Holocaust. The novel also raises the question of law and justice, and what can happen when the law can’t stretch far enough to ensure justice.

Related:

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

"Ten Years Gone" by Jonathan Dunsky

Israel Noir. 

It may be a new mystery sub-genre.

D.A. Mishani has his Avraham Avraham police detective novels, set in contemporary Tel Aviv. And now Jonathan Dunksy has published a series of Tel-Aviv-based novels, but with a private investigator as the protagonist and set in the early years of Israel’s modern history, when both the Holocaust and the recently concluded war with the Arab nations hanging heavy over the country.

The first in the series is Ten Years Gone.

It’s 1949, and private eye Adam Lapid spends a good portion of each day at Greta’s Café in Tel Aviv, drinking coffee and playing chess. Lapid is originally from Hungary, where he was a police detective. That is, until he was sent to Auschwitz. He survived; his wife and two daughters did not. And he blames himself for not getting his family to safety until it was too late.

Lapid also uses violence when he deems it necessary or appropriate. He killed at least two former Nazis in cold blood after World War II ended. The Holocaust changed his views of justice. He’s also something of a war hero, for his heroic actions in taking out an Egyptian machine gun nest that had pinned down his unit in the Negev during the war for independence.

He takes on an impossible case. A woman asks him to find her son, the baby she gave to a friend in 1939 who was leaving Germany to try to get to Israel. The woman herself didn’t make it out before the war started but was able to obtain false identity papers and stay hidden under an assumed (and Aryan) name in Frankfort. She’s trying to find her son. But she doesn’t even know if he and the friend made it to Palestine; the British were ferociously trying to stop illegal Jewish immigration to the British Mandate.

Jonathan Dunsky

Lapid talks to police and a journalist, and he’s eventually able to learn that the friend and the baby made it to Tel Aviv and lived under different names. Yet some months after their arrival, they were both gruesomely murdered. It seems a dead end, but Lapid considers his own murdered daughters. And he decides to do everything he can to find the killer.

It’s a dark, fascinating tale.

Jonathan Dunsky has published four Adam Lapid mysteries: Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist; and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

Ten Years Gone artfully blends history and mystery in a riveting read. 

Related:

My review of The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything.

My review of The Missing File.

My review of A Possibility of Violence.

Top photo: A bus from Tel Aviv to the town of Netanya in 1949. Adam Lapid takes a bus just like this one to Netanya during his murder investigation. 

Michael Lister’s “The Big Goodbye”

Panama City, Florida, 1943: Jimmy Riley is a former cop turned private detective. It’s wartime, lots of federal money is being spent, and corruption abounds. A mayor’s race is looming, and the stakes, if primarily local, are high. The best candidate happens to be married to a beauty named Lauren Lewis, who happens to be Jimmy Riley’s former lover and the woman he’s still besotted with.

Jimmy is called “Soldier,” because everyone assumes his injury happened as a result of wartime fighting. It didn’t; what it had to do with was Lauren. Jimmy’s injury is that he lost his right arm, the one he wrote with; the one he shot guns with.

Welcome to The Big Goodbye, Michael Lister’s first of four Jimmy “Soldier” Riley mystery novels. And welcome to noir detective fiction, a 21^st century interpretation of a genre that reach its peak in the 1930s and 1940s. The novel’s title, in fact, is likely borrowed from two of the best known noir detective novels by Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.

The first of four novels in the Jimmy “Soldier” Riley series, The Big Goodbye has all the requisite noir features – a tough guy detective, a beautiful if flawed woman, lots of guns, policemen who step on both sides of the law, political corruption, a not-inconsiderable number of dead bodies, twists and turns, and even the most theoretically saintly characters often caught up in crime and violence.

In this story, everything turns on Lauren Lewis – why she’s being blackmailed (she won’t say), who’s pressuring her husband to quit the mayoral race, and what a sanitarium and its doctor are really up. Jimmy loves Lauren too much to let it all go, and he finds himself sinking ever more quickly into the violence and corruption surrounding him.

Michael Lister

Having read a fair number of the novels in the noir detective genre (in addition to Raymond Chandler, there’s Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, and even the police procedurals of Ed McBain, among many others), I would say The Big Goodbye is a credible and entertaining entry in the genre. Lister uses some profanity, which one won’t find in the novels written back in the 1930s and 1940s, and a couple of explicit scenes that wouldn’t have made it past the publisher’s first readers or review committee those long decades ago. Those elements aside, Lister is faithful to the genre.

Lister followed The Big Goodbye in 2011 with three additional titles in the series: The Big Beyond (2013), The Big Hello (2014), and The Big Bout (2015). He’s also the author of several other novels, detailed at his web site.

If you’re a fan of detective fiction in general and the noir genre in particular, this is a good contemporary series to discover and read.

Photograph: A scene from the movie The Big Combo, a noir detective film released in 1955.

Dashiell Hammett’s “Return of the Thin Man”

Noir detective fiction reigned supreme in America in the 1920s and 1930s, and remained popular through most of the 1950s. And the author who was the acknowledged master of this genre was Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961).

The former Pinkerton detective turned to writing detective stories when he was afflicted with tuberculosis, a disease that would plague him most of his adult life. He wrote stories for “the pulps” – popular detective magazines and a series of novels that set the standard for noir fiction, and in fact likely still set the standard.

He published Red Harvest in 1929, followed by The Dain Curse that same year. Then came The Maltese Falcon in 1930, The Glass Key in 1931, and The Thin Man in 1934. The novels are written tightly and concisely, and are full of action, unexpected turns, and a fair amount of violence. (One of Hammett’s fellow noir writers, Philip Marlowe, gave this writing advice to authors facing writing blocks: “When in doubt, have to men come in the door with guns.”) A group of his stories was published as The Continental Op.

Hammett posed for the cover of The Thin Man.

Hammett’s influence on writers – and on the movies – extended far beyond noir fiction. He’s considered so influential, in fact, that Library of America has published a volume of his novels and a volume of his short stories.

My first awareness of Dashiell Hammett was watching The Thing Man movies of the 1930s and early 1940s on television. Starring William Powell as detective Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as his wife Nora, the movies were widely popular when they were first released. If you’re familiar with the movies at all, it’s almost impossible to see anyone but William Powell when you read the Hammett novel.

I discovered Hammeett as a writer in the 1970s, during a resurgence of the novels of the glory days of noir fiction. I also discovered the Dashiell Hammett who was in love with playwright Lillian Hellman and the Hammett who went to prison rather than divulge names to a congressional committee during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In the last few years, additional writings have turned up in archives and various closets, including two “movie books” written for the scripts of “After the Thin Man” and “Another Thin Man,” both commissioned by MGM Studios. Movie books were essentially novellas written to help the scriptwriters develop and finalize a script. Both of these movie books, and related materials, never previously made public, were published in 2012 as Return of the Thin Man.

Dashiell Hammett

The stories are less novellas than they are movie and Dashiell Hammett artifacts. They even contain periodic filming instructions and parenthetical statements instructing the scriptwriters how to develop particular scenes. Accompanying the stories are headnotes and afterwords by the editors, Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett.

The stories reflect the public tastes in movies in the time period they were released. They often seem formulaic, with “thugs and dames” getting themselves mixed up with the wealthy (and, in one of the stories, even with Nora’s very proper family). The genius of the stories lies not so much in the stories themselves as it does in how Hammett developed the interaction between and relationship of Nick and Nora Charles, which steal the story and also stole the movies. The dialogue involving their back-and-forth is still fascinating today, underscoring how much Hammett could communicate by what wasn’t said as much as by what was.

For fans of noir fiction, it’s a must-read. For those interested in how a master writer developed dialogue, it’s also a must-read. For those of us fascinated with the genre and the period, not to mention what Hammett achieved, it’s a significant contribution to understanding.

Photograph: Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man.

Dashiell Hammett’s “The Hunter and Other Stories”

I first met Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) at the movies, specifically, the movies that were later run on television. I don’t know how old I was when I first watched William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man, but I do know I loved the movie. And then I saw Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

I probably saw Hammett’s name in the movies’ credits (“based on the novel by”), but it likely didn’t mean anything. My understanding of who Dashiell Hammett was and his writing had to wad until the mid-1970s, when a number of his books were republished. I read The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Red Harvest (the Library of America has assembled all of them in one volume). I learned that all of his novels except The thin Man had been first published in serial form in various magazines of the hardboiled mystery and suspense genre that were common well into the 1950s (about the only survivors of the genre are Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine). I learned that he wrote numerous stories and several screenplays.

And I learned about the man and his life – his work as a Pinkerton detective, his battle with tuberculosis, how he started writing, his family his relationship with writer Lillian Hellman (part of the story in the movie Julia; Jason Robards played a credible Hammett); and how he was caught up in the communist scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, was sent to prison for that refusal, and was blacklisted by both publishers and movie studios.

I still enjoy reading his stories and novels His prose is lean, spare and power-packed. He was the best of the hardboiled detective school writers, and even today he’s recognized for being among the finest of American writers.

I have another reason for enjoying his writing. My father was a fan. He read Hammett in the 1930s and 1940s, in all those mystery magazines. In fact, my father was the “target demographic” of many of those magazines, although the term wasn’t used back then. Reading Hammett is a connection to my father, and a connection to a very different time in American history and culture.

Hammett’s stories have been collected and published over the years, and now comes The Hunter and Other Stories, published by The Mysterious Press and edited with very helpful commentary by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett. It includes 18 stories and three “screen stories,” or plot summaries for movies. Most of the stories, including the title story, have never been previously published.

Not all of the stories are crime or detective stories; Hammett often reached beyond the mystery and suspense magazines to reach a broader audience. But they are all recognizably Hammeett, with their tough, lean prose, action-filled scenes and often surprising twists and turns.

In “The Hunter,” a detective investigates a fraudulent check, and it’s all in a day’s work. “The Diamond Wager” concerns a bet – whether a valuable necklace could be stolen from a jewelry store in Paris. “Magic” has a magician delivering what will cause himself personal pain. “Faith” is about the tragedy that dogs a man’s life, and what he does to avoid something worse. “The Cure” is also about a bet – that one man’s fear of swimming can be cured by another man (and the consequences are completely unexpected).

The three screen stories – “The Kiss-Off,” “Devil’s Playground,” and “On the Make” – are recognizably noir.”The Kiss-Off” eventually became the 1931 movie City Streets, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney. “On the Make” was filmed and released as “Mr. Dynamite” in 1935. “The Devil’s Playground” was created, the editors say in their commentary, as part of the deep interest in all-things-China in the 1920s and 1930s (remember Charlie Chan?) but was never filmed.

It’s a fascinating volume. The stories are generally all period – they wouldn’t quite fit, or fit very well, with contemporary sensibilities. But they are stories by Dashiell Hammett, they bear his trademark and imprint. And that means they are and will continue to be entertaining.

My father would have enjoyed them.