Killer in the Rain by Raymond Chandler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Chandler definitely has some sentences that he borrowed from Hemingway. That’s fine, we all do I guess. These stories are pretty cool, but they get a bit monotonous. The hero’s always going to get knocked unconscious in the 3rd or 4th chapter. He’s never really going to get paid. He’s going to drink a lot.

But there are moments of literary brilliance, where Chandler makes the California landscape come alive in a real nice way, and there are some beautiful phrases about stars or the shapes light makes at different times. He had a bad habit of writing those sentences that are lists of only two things with a comma between instead of an ‘and’, but he cut it out after a few stories. You know: “He got up and went over to the window again, looked through the side of the blind.” I don’t know why it bothers me so much. I put this sentence structure in my own stories, because it works for certain things and seems to cause a certain effect for readers, but I don’t like it.



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