Killer in the Rain and Other Stories

"Just who the hell are you?" he growled.
"A shamus. The name doesn't matter." (pp42-43)

Raymond Chandler can't fool us. He might name his detective Dalmas in the eight stories included in Killer in the Rain, or Carmady, or leave him unnamed, but the reader immediately recognises him as Marlowe. The same voice is there, the same style and groove, the same dialogue that can get to the core of a character in a single line.

It didn't bother me that I was already familiar with the content; that Chandler later cannibalised these eight pulp-magazine stories into his novels The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake. Sure, there was an uncanny element to reading this collection, but it's been years since I read those books and, show more besides, Chandler's a delight at all times. The way his proto-Marlowe detective navigates his cases, which is such a comfort to a regular reader. The delicious settings, whether that's the sleaze of Bay City or the ominous cut-glass danger of the mountain lakes in the final two stories. The tinderbox gunfight scene in 'The Man Who Liked Dogs' (pg. 103), and the vividness of supporting characters like De Spain in 'Bay City Blues', "a big, dark, dead-pan copper who didn't seem to have any more nerves than a cement-mixer" (pg. 390).

Safe to say, if you have any taste for great dialogue and a classy, smoky mood painted by a master, you're already a Raymond Chandler fan, and if you've not read the novels in a while this is a great way to return to them. show less

It is a pleasure coming back to Chandler after many years!
This is a posthumous collection of 8 of his early short stories that were published in pulp magazines between 1935 and 1941 and not included by R.Ch. in The Simple Art of Murder. Durham says in the Introduction that they were left out there because they had been ‘cannibalized’: Chandler has reused and built-on much material from them in his later novels. Durham describes that in detail. The evolution of Chandler’s detective-hero, the later Philip Marlow, can be traced from story to story: he is ‘motivated less by the desire to solve the mystery of a murder than by the compelling necessity to right social injustices’. For his pains he gets frequently knocked out. Such show more idealism looks quaint today! (VII-14) show less

This is one of those hard boiled private eye stories that made Raymond Chandler famous, and though the book was published in 1964, after Chandler's death, the story was written in the 30s and published in a magazine, Black Mask.

As a literary work, read today, it is really nothing special. The silent, strong, violent hero (or anti-hero) is quite common nowadays but being a long time reader of Child's Reacher novels, I can clearly see the line from Chandler to Child.

This story is short, and can easily be read in one sitting. There will be stereotypical bad guys, there will be women whose main characteristic will be being women and there will be guns and cars. Read it if you want a peek back 80-90 years, but otherwise there are better hard show more boiled books. show less

Although these stories have many of the characteristics that mark his full length fiction and make him such a compelling narrator, they are not so sharp focused. They are certainly good enough to merit reading but the real interest is in tracing the development of Philip Marlowe as a character. 21 February 2018

I was breaking a new pair of shoes in on my desk that morning when Violet M'Gee called me up. It was a hot, damp August day and you couldn't keep your neck dry with a bath towel.

Another excellent collection of Chandlers' short stories. All of the same hardboiled sort, and the detectives have different names, but pretty much the same guy. Each of these was used in some part for his first four novels of the Marlowe series.

Eight (8) short stories; L.A.; in these stories Philip Marlowe is being invented and in Killer in the Rain (4th story) published 1935 (in Black Mask) is nameless first person narrator, then named Carmady, then John Delmas; in No Crime in the Mountainsin 1941 he is John Evans; but in the meantime, he has become Marlowe; 1st Novel The Big Sleep is drawn mostly from the short stories Killer in the Rain and The Curtain;