While travelling I went looking for Chandler’s ‘The Lady in the Lake’ on Audible to test Jacques Barzun contention that it is the best of Chandler’s many good novels, but all I could find was a cut down dramatised version. I did listen to that and it had the essence of the plot but not enough of the prose. I also noticed ‘The Killer in the Rain’ and took it, too. This was a reading not an enactment.
‘The Killer in the Rain’ is a collection of early short stories by Chandler which, in this version, includes:
‘Killer in the Rain’
‘Goldfish’
‘Finger Man’
‘The Curtain’
Having read the complete Chandler oeuvre, I have read these stories but have not thought of them for years. Time to re-new our acquaintance.
Two things emerged. First, I heard characters, incidents, events, situations that Chandler re-worked later in his novels. It was interesting to realise that good as the stories were, they were improved when he re-worked them into the novels. Though there also people and events in the stories that did not make it to the novels, some pretty arresting ones, especially those goldfish and the small woman with the big gun.
Second, Elliot Gould was all wrong for this assignment. He just does not sound like California. He lacks the laconic sunshine in his voice of, say, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, James Garner, or Powers Boothe, all of whom have had a turn at Marlowe. Yes, I know Humphrey Bogart was also a New Yorker but he did not sound it the way Gould does. Now perhaps it is because I know who Gould is that I say that. But while I am saying it I will add that he sounds like a New Yorker.
His diction is perfect; he does well in distinguishing the voices of all the characters, yet I quibble.
There is more, perhaps I was also distracted because I know why he got the assignment. He played Marlow in a Robert Altman film ‘The Long Goodbye’ in 1973 derived from Chandler’s novel of the same name. And that is my point, because that film was a parody of Marlowe. Its expressed purpose was to show how inept and unsuited such a figure as Marlowe was in the real word of crime and corruption.
To return to my theme. Gould’s claim to the job is that he was the anti-Marlowe. That niggled me, too. That made two strikes against it. I cringed at his New York voice and I just knew he had no sympathy for the character he was projecting. Had he any sympathy he would never have done the Altman film!
There are dozens of alternatives to listen to on my iPhone but I stuck out ‘The Killer in the Rain’ to the end. Why? Chandler’s prose.
Raymond Chandler
That man could turn a phrase, spin a metaphor, bite off a line, all in the warm California sunshine he could present a very dark, very black world.
The bad news is that Gould is the reader for most of the Chandler titles on Audible.
I discovered Audible Books with my first smartphone, a Samsung, and liked the idea. At that time I walked the honourable dog several mornings a week and sometimes in the afternoon, too. Kate and I were both working and we took turns. When on dog walking duty I listened to talking books.
I was familiar with talking books on CDs and had listened to many on drives in the States, including much Marcel Proust. Those titles were all books that had been produced for voice. With Audible I also discovered books that were only Voice Books, just as there are books that are only Electronic books, v-books and e-books. The first v-book I heard was a freebie from Audible, that must have been the business model to lure in customers, about letters to Sherlock Holmes’s address. It was a nice idea for a set up. I joined Audible and continue to subscribe.
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