Word: chandler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with all the standard props of detective fiction, Thomas Berger's eighth novel is a spoof of whodunits only in the sense that Portnoy's Complaint was a redaction of Oedipus Rex. Berger's chief debt is not to the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but to the fiction of the '60s (including his own Little Big Man), written before black humor had been eclipsed by black studies. The convoluted and brazenly preposterous plot of Who Is Teddy Villanova? is simply Berger's excuse to practice verbal gunplay with a license to kill...
...description, Raymond Chandler's sketch of a private eye is irresistible-the urban gunslinger with all the smarts. It makes a powerful myth. No matter how many Sunday-supplement articles report that a private detective is probably an ex-cop who guards industrial secrets, some romance still clings to him. Nicholas Pileggi, a New York-based investigative reporter, has written a book about one authentic private eye. It is a painstaking job, which makes it pleasant to report that while this trim detective has little chance to crack wise with classy dames, there are a few traces...
...imbroglio. Robert Benton, screenwriter and director, does a lot of borrowing, from both classic and more recent detective flicks, but does his cribbing in style. The actors, meanwhile, are heavily, and affectingly, into themselves: particularly the kharma and vibrations-obssessed Tomlin. With the same L.A. backdrop that the great Chandler stories grew out of, this one proves as well-oiled as the barrel on a Smith and Wesson Model 19 357 Magnum...
PHILIP MARLOWE was always a hard one to figure. He was a loner, and he liked that way. A streak of cynicism ran through him as deep, his creator Raymond Chandler might say, as a spotted geister in a Chicago overcoat sent back-stroking in the blue Pacific. He was a hardened private dick, a real pro, and could trade quips and insults with any manner of wise-cracking low life. When a dumb and slutty millionaire's daughter tries to lead him on in The Big Sleep, cooing "you're cute," the unarousable Marlowe answers back, "What...
...Raymond Chandler's undauntable tough guy was a surprisingly soft touch when it came to certain ideals. Like professionalism: he prided himself on keeping his business on the up and up, on staying loyal to his clients, and on always sticking to his standard fee, $25 a day plus expenses--no more, no less. (That is, unless some old fogey with nothing better to do decided to get generous.) And he had a special prickly pride about his apartment at the Hobart Arms. The same tease mentioned above somehow manages to seduce a pass-key away from the super...