Customer Reviews

Trouble Is My Business

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CAUTION: The edition shipped by Amazon is not the 642-page, twelve-story edition of this title advertised here and not the one which the online review discusses. For some bizarre reason, and sometime between 1988 and now, Vintage has edited out eight of the most important stories and left the reader with only four, but kept the same title: Trouble is My Business. An outrage, certainly. Don't be fooled by the bibliographic information given by Amazon: the book you receive will have only 214 pages and contain only four stories!

I bought a dog-eared copy of this collection ("Trouble is My Business") at a book sale for $1.50 a year ago. The copy I have is thick with 12 stories. I bought this copy of "Trouble is my Business" to have a better copy, but was disappointed to discover that it had been whittled down to only the final four Marlowe stories. My question is, what the hell happened to the first 8 and why is Amazon.com still describing this as a collection of 12 when there are merely four? That's not jake, fellas.

There are those who feel that The Big Sleep or Farewell My Lovely are Chandler's best work, but I disagree. As fine as they are, they were, after all, taken from his previously published short stories. Chandler was not a novelist, really. He was writer of scenes. He could spend paragraphs describing a room, or a person, or an open field, for that matter, and leave you begging for more. These four stories are the best he had to offer. Red Wind gets the most attention, usually, thanks to the classic opening paragraph, but my personal favorite is Goldfish. The character of Carol Donovan is the most exquisitely drawn hard-boiled female since Brigit O'Shaughnessy, and the finale is as good as the finale of Shane.

Chandler fans reading this book for the first time will have many "deja vu" moments. The book contains four of the twenty short stories written by Chandler in the 1930s that were warm ups for the seven novels that followed. Chandler wrote detective mystery stories, and became famous for seven novels and a number of Hollywood screen plays, mostly about crime and private detectives in the "film noir" genre of Hollywood black and white films, or what is called LA "pulp fiction". Far from being an ordinary writer of cheap crime stories, Chandler became one of America's best writers from the mid 20th century.

Chandler was a Los Angeles accountant turned writer and he developed his own careful writing style. He started by first analysing other works, such as articles in the Black Mask mystery magazine. He used those stories plus local newspaper crime articles for plot ideas. He would set some of his stories in the fictional ocean side town of Bay City which is really Santa Monica, or set his stories in west Los Angeles, or other parts of southern California. He lived in Santa Monica after being fired from his oil executive job for drinking in the 1930s. He detested the place and moved into LA proper when he became wealthy as a screenplay writer in the early 1940s while working at Paramount. In the late 1940s he moved to La Jolla, just north of San Diego. Chandler started with short fiction pieces in the 1930s and then graduated to novels in 1938-39. From the early novels he was hired to write screen plays and eventually he wrote or created 59 works including stories, screenplays, and novels. His novels with the private Detective Phillip Marlowe brought him fame including the Bogart-Bacall movie The Big Sleep.

This book contains four short stories each about 50 to 60 pages long from the 1930s. These are a warm ups to his seven novels and screenplays that followed. There are plot elements and prose that are almost a duplicate of some of the later novels. For example, the second story Finger Man has scenes and references that are almost directly inserted into The Big Sleep (1939) and Farwewell, My Lovely (1940). For Chandler lovers like myself, it is like eating chocolates to go back and be able to read these early works. Also Chandler has a four page introduction where he makes a number of comments on his writing style and philosophy at the front of the book. Trouble is my Business is the first of the four short stories.

His career did not take off until after he had written three or four novels and started to do screenplays in the mid-1940s. He was lucky in that he was able to write the screenplays and make a lot of money. He became famous for the screenplays, but simultaneously, he rose to further fame by the growth in popularity of paperback books in the 1940s. As a result, millions of his Philip Marlowe detective novels were sold and after just a few years he had moved from a run down flat in Santa Monica to a large house with an ocean view beside the Kellog family in La Jolla. He is now recognised as one of America's best writers from the 1930s through 1940s era. If you get a chance, have a look at the movie Double Indemnity, where Chandler co-wrote the screenplay with Billy Wilder at Paramount - his first attempt at this type of writing - and he and Wilder were nominated for an Oscar but they did not win. I think that is an excellent film, and it is generally regarded as one of the best films of the period.

His technique was to pull old stories apart, then change them, then re-write them as short stories, and then take that work and extend it, modify it again a second or third time or even more, and finally put together complete novels. He would take six months to write a short story - as found in the present collection, while some other mystery writers wrote a complete novel in a week - by dictation. He was not big on plots, but more of a craftsman on the individual scenes and the prose, especially descriptions of the people. He said that it took him two years to write a short description of a person getting up from a table and walking out of a room. So there is a high level of refinement and a certain style that he was able to develop as a result of this writing process. This technique is not new. Shakespeare himself used this technique in virtually every play, taking old myths, stories, and historical accounts such as King Lear. He would break them apart, change them, and make new works with new twists, turns, and addnew characters; his last play The Tempest is his thought to be his only completely original play. Chandler used to joke that if Shakespeare was alive, he would be a Hollywood writer. Chandler is a little more obvious in that some of the prose in the seven novels are almost lifted from the early works - in part because Chandler wrote only one half page increments at a time, and kept those half page writings on file to use as source materials for later works. His aim was to make each segment as complate as possible, but some of his early short stories are similar to and have almost identical names to the full novels.

In any case, this is a book that is not to be missed by Chandler fans and it is simply excellent for anyone else.

Count Jason Ennis: You can find the rest of the stories from "Trouble is My Business" in the Chandler title "The Simple Art of Murder." That's another great collection of the master's work. Now that's a collection worthy of a bishop kicking a hole through a stained-glass window!" -- Dashiell Millar

Some of the stories are better than others. I liked the last one of the four, "Red Wind" the best. Chandler wrote amazingly vivid descriptions of people's minute physical actions, their appearances, and physical surroundings. He painted visually georgeous portraits of crooks, lowlifes, and detectives. His plots were complex, too. The Lady in the Lake is also a beautiful book. Very high body count in his books and vivid corpses, too. It's no wonder he's still popular. Certainly no movie could do his work justice.

I have reviewed Raymond Chandler's seven full Phillip Marlowe epics elsewhere in this space. For those who doubt that a mere plebian detective in a once seedy genre can hold your attention and win your admiration as very, very good literature then try these four short pieces to work up the 'big' boys. You will not be disappointed. Moreover, you will get a fair peek at what makes Marlowe tick-his sense of honor, his doggedness in the face of adversity and his tilting after windmills when he gets his teeth in a case. And it does not hurt if there is a good-looking 'dame' in the bargain.

If none of the above convinces you then get this book for the preface by the master Chandler himself about his take, circa 1950, on the meaning of the detective genre as literature. As we know his special pleading then is now the wisdom of the academy.

ON BECOMING PHILLIP MARLOWE

Apparently there are many, many editions of this work. Above I have reviewed the one that has Chandler's introduction. Since then I have found a copy under the same title that has 12 stories in it many of which are different from the above. If you can find it- Vintage Paperback-1988- you will be justly rewarded because what you will get are snatches of stories with various charcters, locales, named detectives and different ending that will later go on to become The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely and Lady in the Lake. Get it if you can, if for no other reason than to see how the master noir detective writer moved the work forward. Amazing.

(Kindle version review) One of my favorite writers and collections, but this is a very poor format ebook. The OCR-related typos are very annoying - they aren't uniform, it's as though several pages, scattered through the book, weren't edited or checked at all.

The title of this review is from the introduction to "Trouble Is My Business." But Raymond Chandler never had doubts about his writing. He once said, "Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know." Thankfully he took his own advice and this book of short stories by the master of us all will illustrate just how good the so-called pulp writing was back then, back in what was truly the golden age of crime fiction.

Perfect starting point for those wanting to find out who the hell this Chandler guy was. Way ahead of his time, and over the head of the "cat detective" set, these stories a pure gold. The John Dalmas character is essentially a raw Philip Marlowe, but the knight errant is still there, in an unrefined form. Bay City Blues, Mandarin's Jade, The Lady in the Lake...stories and attitudes that Tarrantino can only dream of ripping off. Read it now before La-La Land turns it into the next Demi Moore vehicle