Just finished
Killer in the Rain, a collection of Raymond Chandler's short stories originally published in pulp magazines like
Black Mask, and never republished in his lifetime. An interesting book for fans of Chandler and the hardboiled genre in general.
Unlike the stories reprinted in
The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler had "cannibalized" the stories in
Killer in the Rain for plots and characters which he re-used in full-length novels like
The Big Sleep,
Farewell, My Lovely and
The Lady in the Lake. Chandler felt uneasy about allowing stories he had "cannibalized" see the light of day again, and so they weren't republished until after his death in 1959.
Comparing these short stories to his novels gives an interesting look at Chandler's technique. Chandler combined the plots from multiple short stories into each novel and "blew up" many passages (the description of the orchid house in
The Curtain is 42 words long, while in
The Big Sleep it's 82 words), and the results are much more verbose & convoluted. The comparison is an interesting counterpoint to Dashiell Hammett's novelization of
The Maltese Falcon; in that case, Hammett took his original serialized story and pared it down to the core, removing scenes and entire characters which don't meaningfully contribute to the story.
And though it's been a few years since I read them, I honestly don't recall there being
as much racism in Chandler's novels as there is in these short stories,
Try the Girl and
Mandarin's Jade are particularly bad. And I also discovered that Chandler
did write a story with German & Japanese spies in it (awful stories featuring Japanese spies were a staple of American pulps during the war).
