Pick-up on Noon Street, by Raymond Chandler.
Chandler is about style. Fashion, interiors, language--spare, readable, cynical language. The language of people wounded by life, clinging to particles of self-respect. Those are Chandler’s strengths.
Plot is not his strength. After reading all four stories in the collection, I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. I could admire the hell out of the writing, but the writing was so much stronger than plot it ended up distracting me; don’t ask me to tell you what happened.
I do remember a little of the first story—“Pick-up on Noon Street”—because the beginning was cool. Guy tries to pick up a floozy, but she’ll only do him for lots of liquor. He doesn’t have money, so he plots a stick-up. Pete Anglich, alkie (seems as if all of Chandler’s heroes are, um, Problem Drinkers), a sort of retired detective (ditto) ends up killing the guy in a flophouse (with vividly seedy interiors), then gets tricked into picking up a package he shouldn’t. A seedy movie star is involved—or maybe that’s the next story. I get them mixed up. Is this sameness of plot Chandler’s fault or my deteriorating brain’s?The plots do, in the end, neatly tie themselves up, but they are not exactly memorable.
What’s memorable are faces, interiors, clothes—descriptions that make me quiver in disgusted delight. Consider this excerpt from “Smart Aleck Kill”:
Derek Waldon opened the door. He was about forty-five, possibly a little more, and had a lot of powdery gray hair and a handsome, dissipated face that was beginning to go pouchy. He had on a monogrammed lounging robe and a glass full of whisky in his hand. He was a little drunk.
Pleasantly depraved, especially the kicker. Here’s another from the same story:
Dolmers and the girl sat in a small booth with hard seats and looped-back green curtains. There were high partitions between the booths. There was a long bar down the other side of the room and a big jukebox at the end of it.
After reading that, I want a Jack Daniels on the rocks with a splash of water.
Here, from “Nevada Gas,” is ’a description of Hugo Candless, a big, obnoxious, newly rich bastard getting dressed in his country club locker room, while Dial, his paddleball partner watches:
Candless didn’t answer, didn’t look at him. Dial stood silent with his drink and watched the big man put on monogrammed satin underclothes, purple socks with gray clocks, a monogrammed silk shirt, a suit of tiny black and white checks that made him look as big as a barn.
Maybe not as repulsive as Humpert Humpert throwing on a bathrobe and flouncing downstairs to suckle Lolita’s toes, but still pretty gross. No wonder Candless gets knocked off a few pages later.
Kind of hard to ignore, by the way, that Chandler has a thing for dressing his creeps in monogrammed clothes.
Unfortunately, the racism that makes frequent appearances in Chandler’s world is also hard to ignore. Sure, negroes with rolling eyes and thick lips were stock characters of movies and books, but the caricatures here are painfully dated. The blacks are simple doorman or feeling-their-oats-but-dumb criminals. In other words, big-lipped cartoons. Gangsters and morons—or both. Not that white people are particularly saintly but they come off a little smarter.
So what do we do with Chandler? His blacks are racist props. His plots—at least in these stories—are interchangeable. But his writing is laser-focused on a creepy nighttime Los Angeles where men are weak and appealingly flawed, women are weak and understandably dishonest, a Los Angeles of intense and foreboding reality that Chandler fashioned out of clothes, faces, and décor. Yowza.