Cruising on the hard-boiled highway: Short-stories by the masters

Now I know why Eliot said, “April is the cruellest month.”  What with the exam season here and the heat, and the other things that came in and filled the gaps, April was a total washout in terms of doing anything even remotely interesting.  Conducting exams, correcting papers, the other added tasks, and all this in the April heat.  Shruti’s university had its convocation in the last week of April and she was being pulled into almost everything related to the event.  Her hours were crazy during this period, not to mention her mood and mind.  I didn’t buy a single book, not even a secondhand book, during this period.  Yeah, it was that bad.  The hangover of the April stress spilled over into May, and the heat also increased.  May brought in its own myriad issues, but I managed to hold on.  I bought some books, some new, some old.  I was very pleased with the new books.  I had started reading Michael Connelly’s Bosch novels sometime in February.  I bought a whole lot of them on secondhand portals on amazon and am binge reading them.  I also managed to watch all episodes of all seasons of Bosch so far.  So, it is Bosch all along now. 

I actually wanted to do a follow-up on the ‘hard-boiled’ post that I put up in March before I got delightfully sidetracked by Lamming and Henshaw.  So, here I am, almost two months later, with a collection of hard-boiled books which I bought in February. 

There is a used books portal on amazon, where one can find real hard-to-find books, or at least I found quite a few of them.  So, the books are exclusive and also expensive.  It was from here that I managed to fill the gaps in my Martin Beck collection.  I couldn’t find these books anywhere else.  I had to pay the clichéd ‘an arm and a leg’ each time, but that was because I was comparing the prices with Abids prices … bad habit … like the clichéd (again!) freshly-landed-in-the-US Indian habit of mentally converting dollars to rupees in the US before making a purchase.  Anyway, all this is proverbial water under the clichéd bridge, more or less.      

I continued visiting this portal and was charmed by the collection of books they offered.  I found and bought my precious Lamming novels from this portal.  I wanted to explore and see if they had anything by the hard-boiled masters.  I was not disappointed.  In fact, I was overwhelmed.  It was a problem of plenty and so, what to choose and what to leave became a problem.  I was, in some way, reconciled to the prices by now.  I decided to go for the short-stories.  I had read and enjoyed the Continental Op stories by Dashiell Hammett and wanted to read more.  I hadn’t read any short-stories by Raymond Chandler.  I found two books of short-stories each by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  And I also found a novel, Woman in the Dark, by Hammett.  I couldn’t resist and bought all five in two batches. Here are the two Chandler collections:

Except for one, all short-stories by Chandler are covered in these two volumes.  I think I was really lucky to find the hardback volume of The Smell of Fear.  It also has, on the cover, the picture of the actor, Powers Boothe, who played Philip Marlowe in the TV series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (aired during 1983-1986).  The other Chandler collection is Killer in the Rain. 

 

These are the two Hammett collections ... 

The Big Knock-over, first published in 1966, is hailed as an important collection that ‘helped revive Hammett’s reputation as a literary writer.’ This collection has an introduction by Lillian Hellman, the playwright, with whom Hammett had an affair for around 30 years.  Apart from other stories, both collections have 7 Continental Op stories each.   

Woman in the Dark is called a ‘three-part novelette.’ I’ll find out what it is only when I read it.  There are two more Hammett collections I am eyeing.  While one is really really expensive, the other is within reach, but they are charging a bomb for dispatch and delivery.  I’ll wait and see.