Raymond Chandler is my favorite writer.
His work was hard boiled featuring tough talking thugs and fem fatales but there was always a humor interlaced among the dialogue.
"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler,
Man, that's writing.
“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
A poet.
So it was that I found myself buying to two volume hardcover collection of the complete works of Raymond Chandler from The Library of American Literature or something like that. The only trouble is the dust jackets on the two volumes are what I would call...bland.
You can't judge a book by it's cover, but in this case I can. There's nothing bland about Chandler's writing. The man himself? Well that may be another story. He wasn't afraid to criticize the writing of his peers-- once calling Agatha Christie's mystery style as lazy.
He was right to attack-- one of the rules he puts forth in his book on writing is that things can't happen via coincidence or happenstance. A murderer can't base his whole ingenious scheme on some bizarrely abstract accident and then expect to be successful. Chandler's characters talked like real people but in a stylized way-- so I made my own dust jackets for the set;
