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Blackmailers Don't Shoot
These 13 short stories span the full range of Chandler’s career, from ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’ first published in 1933 to ‘English Summer’, a black and yet oddly tender story of adultery, cruelty and murder published posthumously in 1976.
487 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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122 people want to read
About the author
Raymond Chandler
449 books5,614 followersRaymond 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."
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."
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 16, 2025
This one is Chandler's first story, quite an average one: everybody drinks, smokes and has a gun.
From time to time ( at the matter of fact quite often...) all these guys shoot each other and six times from ten somebody dies.
So nothing too valuable to remember, maybe only that Mallory seems to be Marlowe's precursor.
From time to time ( at the matter of fact quite often...) all these guys shoot each other and six times from ten somebody dies.
So nothing too valuable to remember, maybe only that Mallory seems to be Marlowe's precursor.
October 4, 2016
This Is How It All Began
Raymond Chandler is among the half-dozen of my favourite writers, and one of the reasons – apart from his inimitable style – is the fact that he did not start writing before he turned forty-four. It’s not so much because the world would be spared a lot of tripe if more people waited until their thirties or so before they started writing books – although there might be something to it – that I like Chandler the more for having started writing at such a late age but because it leaves some grace period to me. I can always say to myself, “Just look at Chandler, or Conrad, old Shandy. It’s never too late to start writing books.”
The short story Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, which appeared in the legendary “Black Mask” magazine in late 1933, was Chandler’s debut as a writer. We already get a breathtakingly entangled plot, full of surprises and double-crossing, which is so typical of Raymond Chandler but which will probably leave you clueless at times (as it surely did leave me, and so I am not even going to try to sort it all out here), but we also see first gleams of the inimitable Chandler style both in the dialogue and in the narrator’s voice. The protagonist, a gumshoe called Mallory, will also remind us of that lonely hero Marlowe, who usually fends for himself, although Mallory does not seem to be quite as concerned about his honour as Marlowe is because after all, at the beginning of the story we will find him working for a gangster. We have crooked cops, a beast of a femme fatale, a shady lawyer, all sorts of gangsters and their henchmen, a lot of shoot-outs and an official police report that settles the whole case admirably, and cynically.
If you have read most of the novels already, this story will probably not really awe you but nevertheless it will give you a foretaste of Chandler at the height of his craft.
Raymond Chandler is among the half-dozen of my favourite writers, and one of the reasons – apart from his inimitable style – is the fact that he did not start writing before he turned forty-four. It’s not so much because the world would be spared a lot of tripe if more people waited until their thirties or so before they started writing books – although there might be something to it – that I like Chandler the more for having started writing at such a late age but because it leaves some grace period to me. I can always say to myself, “Just look at Chandler, or Conrad, old Shandy. It’s never too late to start writing books.”
The short story Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, which appeared in the legendary “Black Mask” magazine in late 1933, was Chandler’s debut as a writer. We already get a breathtakingly entangled plot, full of surprises and double-crossing, which is so typical of Raymond Chandler but which will probably leave you clueless at times (as it surely did leave me, and so I am not even going to try to sort it all out here), but we also see first gleams of the inimitable Chandler style both in the dialogue and in the narrator’s voice. The protagonist, a gumshoe called Mallory, will also remind us of that lonely hero Marlowe, who usually fends for himself, although Mallory does not seem to be quite as concerned about his honour as Marlowe is because after all, at the beginning of the story we will find him working for a gangster. We have crooked cops, a beast of a femme fatale, a shady lawyer, all sorts of gangsters and their henchmen, a lot of shoot-outs and an official police report that settles the whole case admirably, and cynically.
If you have read most of the novels already, this story will probably not really awe you but nevertheless it will give you a foretaste of Chandler at the height of his craft.
June 19, 2019
COUNTDOWN: Mid-20th Century North American
BOOK (Novella) 192 (of 250)
This is Chandler's first work, published in 1933. Supposedly, he had studied other authors (especially Hammett) and took about half a year to write this.
HOOK - 3: "The man in the powder-blue suit...was tall...His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray...His name happened to be Mallory." What I noticed first here is that name, Mallory. In Dashiell Hammett's "Red Harvest" the narrator is never named and has no life outside of the crime story. I think Chandler, here, wanted to stake his territory: with his own first work he'd name his P.I. in the first paragraph. The third paragraph has Mallory saying: "The letters will cost you ten grand, Miss Farr. That's not too much." And we know, sort of, where we are headed. That, too, is in opposition to "Red Harvest", a masterpiece of swirling people and plot. But the "ever so" is just ever so cliched. Then again, maybe it's Chandler's own.
PACE - 2: Slow for a novella: we really don't need a description of half the characters in the Club Bolivar in the opening scene as they have nothing to do with the story.
PLOT - 3: Mallory is blackmailing Miss Rhonda Farr as she has written love letters to a very suspicious character. Will she pay? Or, are the letters even real? I liked a couple of twists toward the end of the story.
CHARACTERS - 3: Rhonda Farr tries hard to play it cool, saying, "Publicity darling. Just publicity. Any kind is better than none at all." She understands how to play the part of a Hollywood screen star." And later in the story, Mallory drops his price to 5K. And oh, does Mallory have a back story.
A second cliche appears here that goes something like, "Any publicity is good publicity." Did Chandler coin that term also? I don't know.
ATMOSPHERE - 2: Chandler lays it on thick for no apparent reason. In the Bolivar Club, description after description is given of characters having no part in the story. Some lines are good, but this one I can't fathom: "Oh yes? Make mine strawberry," Mallary said with a sudden sneer. I have no clue as to what that means. Make my life sweeter? Make my story better?
SUMMARY: 2.6. A good first effort, a solid story, but for me it read a little slow for a novella as it is loaded with unnecessary, relentless, ongoing, repetitive, seemingly endless adjectives. But that's Chandler: I've read all 7 of his novels.
BOOK (Novella) 192 (of 250)
This is Chandler's first work, published in 1933. Supposedly, he had studied other authors (especially Hammett) and took about half a year to write this.
HOOK - 3: "The man in the powder-blue suit...was tall...His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray...His name happened to be Mallory." What I noticed first here is that name, Mallory. In Dashiell Hammett's "Red Harvest" the narrator is never named and has no life outside of the crime story. I think Chandler, here, wanted to stake his territory: with his own first work he'd name his P.I. in the first paragraph. The third paragraph has Mallory saying: "The letters will cost you ten grand, Miss Farr. That's not too much." And we know, sort of, where we are headed. That, too, is in opposition to "Red Harvest", a masterpiece of swirling people and plot. But the "ever so" is just ever so cliched. Then again, maybe it's Chandler's own.
PACE - 2: Slow for a novella: we really don't need a description of half the characters in the Club Bolivar in the opening scene as they have nothing to do with the story.
PLOT - 3: Mallory is blackmailing Miss Rhonda Farr as she has written love letters to a very suspicious character. Will she pay? Or, are the letters even real? I liked a couple of twists toward the end of the story.
CHARACTERS - 3: Rhonda Farr tries hard to play it cool, saying, "Publicity darling. Just publicity. Any kind is better than none at all." She understands how to play the part of a Hollywood screen star." And later in the story, Mallory drops his price to 5K. And oh, does Mallory have a back story.
A second cliche appears here that goes something like, "Any publicity is good publicity." Did Chandler coin that term also? I don't know.
ATMOSPHERE - 2: Chandler lays it on thick for no apparent reason. In the Bolivar Club, description after description is given of characters having no part in the story. Some lines are good, but this one I can't fathom: "Oh yes? Make mine strawberry," Mallary said with a sudden sneer. I have no clue as to what that means. Make my life sweeter? Make my story better?
SUMMARY: 2.6. A good first effort, a solid story, but for me it read a little slow for a novella as it is loaded with unnecessary, relentless, ongoing, repetitive, seemingly endless adjectives. But that's Chandler: I've read all 7 of his novels.
January 9, 2018
A bit too convoluted for its own good, and I'm a fan of Chandler's novels. But maybe I just don't understand Hollywood, baby.
January 1, 2019
Chandler’s first short story. A little disjointed and slightly difficult to keep track but has the telltale detective noir style of Marlowe.
February 28, 2022
*
28February2022
Read in 19June2021 as part of the collection Red Wind.
28February2022
Read in 19June2021 as part of the collection Red Wind.
October 23, 2017
Short read. Clearly early Chandler effort, but you can see the process taking on the form that will make his later work so invigorating to read. Great intro to the work of one of my favorite detective storytellers.
March 20, 2023
Though in some ways I think chandler works better in the novella/novel form these short stories where fine.
I think however due to the constraints of the form and his imagination things can at times get a bit jumbled and the characterisation..well...it gets intense.
Some good stories in these mind you and I will start reading the companion collection I have soon too.
No Marlowe stories but mainly of the same cut ..private dick..sassy gal..gangster around the edges..that said there are two stories more in the fantasy realm which showed strong promise and one he calls a gothic romance..which it sort of is..though murder hangs around again.
Anyhow onwards to something else.
I think however due to the constraints of the form and his imagination things can at times get a bit jumbled and the characterisation..well...it gets intense.
Some good stories in these mind you and I will start reading the companion collection I have soon too.
No Marlowe stories but mainly of the same cut ..private dick..sassy gal..gangster around the edges..that said there are two stories more in the fantasy realm which showed strong promise and one he calls a gothic romance..which it sort of is..though murder hangs around again.
Anyhow onwards to something else.
August 31, 2022
This is apparently Chandler's first published story. Or as he himself puts it, a novelette. So, there's a good amount of action in the story, which is one of the best things about it. My main qualm is that there are so many characters and angles, some barely covered, that it's easy to lose track.
Of course, his writing here isn't as elegant and nuanced as it would become. But the potential is there. It's not hard to see how Chandler could and did become one of the greatest writers in American literature!
Of course, his writing here isn't as elegant and nuanced as it would become. But the potential is there. It's not hard to see how Chandler could and did become one of the greatest writers in American literature!
February 26, 2020
Hard Boiled action concerning blackmail, kidnapping, dirty cops, swindling lawyers, gun toting mobsters, a femme fatale and the private detective caught in the middle.
July 22, 2021
I was surprised by the low average rating for this beautiful, highly readable collection, but most of the reviews are for just the title story. It was Chandler's first and showed his promise but also the rough edges of a writer learning his craft. The other stories show the development of his unique style.
The setting (mostly a stylised 1930s LA) reminds me a little of Neil Gaiman's work. Both men locate their stories where the everyday respectable world bleeds into a violent unseen world operating under different rules. In Gaiman's case it's a fantasy/horror underworld; with Chandler it's the criminal underworld.
The setting (mostly a stylised 1930s LA) reminds me a little of Neil Gaiman's work. Both men locate their stories where the everyday respectable world bleeds into a violent unseen world operating under different rules. In Gaiman's case it's a fantasy/horror underworld; with Chandler it's the criminal underworld.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews