Raymond Chandler

 Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels are renowned as among the best of the "hard boiled" school of crime fiction, which generally combines detective fiction with a gritty, urban, noir atmosphere.  Although I've read and enjoyed most of Dashiell Hammett's novels and short stories, I've never been able to get very interested in Chandler's works.  I have two of them, The Lady In The Lake, and The Long Good-Bye, and in the past I've tried, but I just couldn't get interested in them.  

So I wasn't very hopeful that they would appeal to me anymore this time around than they did before.  But they both did.  The plots are convoluted and some of the characters stretch the imagination somewhat, but on the whole I found Philip Marlowe believable and both books enjoyable.  

In The Lady In The Lake, Marlowe is commissioned to find a business executive's missing wife who supposedly took off from their mountain cabin with a boyfriend a month before.  An encounter with the boyfriend leads them to believe that the information is false, and the subsequent discovery of a woman's month old body in the mountain lake and further discovery of the boyfriend's very recent corpse complicates the inquiry.  Is it the missing wife's body?  The body of the caretaker's wife?  It's up to Marlowe to sort it all out.  Grade:  B.  

Marlowe encounters an engaging drunk, Terry Lennox, in a Rolls Royce and befriends him in The Long Good-Bye.  Lennox pops in and out of Marlowe's life, ultimately enmeshing him in several murders that may or may not be related.  Grade:  B. 

I don't think I'd like a steady diet of Chandler's noir world, but I found these two books much more enjoyable than I had anticipated.