The Smell of Fear

by Raymond Chandler

Fourteen Stories. Great cover art! Blackmailers Don't Shoot, Pearls are a Nuisance, Finger Man, The King in Yellow, Smart-Aleck Kill, Pick-Up on Noon Street, Nevada Gas, Spanish Blood, Trouble is My Business, Red Wind, I'll be Waiting, Goldfish, Guns at Cyrano, The Pencil Mild foxing. Minor edge wear at foot of spine

Genres: Mystery, Crime, Fiction

538 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.

The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list. The latter novel was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field. In it he wrote: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held."

Reviews

[Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

(I'm really reading the Library of America edition of Raymond Chandler's pulp stories and three novels; this review encompasses the dozen or so stories.) Chandler's stories are as hard-boiled as they come, all revolving around private detectives handling cases that invariably include multiple murders, and usually reaching melancholy conclusions. Raymond Chandler raised this form of lurid thriller to an art, and reading them ninety-plus years after their first appearance is just as pleasurable as it must have been then.

[Fabian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fife short stories of a hard-boiled private detective in Los Angeles in the 30s (?). As always I enjoyed reading a Chandler in these quick-to-read crime stories in the style of "pulp"-literature.

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

*Blackmailers don't shoot --
*Pearls are a nuisance --
*Finger man --
*The king in yellow --
Smart-aleck kill --
*Pick-up on noon street (aka Noon Street nemesis)--
*Nevada gas --
*Spanish blood --
*Trouble is my business --
*Red wind --
Ill be waiting --3
*Goldfish --
*Guns at Cyrano's --
The pencil (aka Wrong pigeon, aka Marlowe takes on the syndicate, aka Philip Marlowe's last case)--1
***
Bay City blues --
The bronze door --
The curtain --
Killer in the rain --
The man who liked dogs --
No crime in the mountains --
Try the girl --

[M.J. Logue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed it, I studied Chandler and pulp literature for my degree and it was a lovely trip down memory lane. Seemed a bit longer and more convoluted than I remember...