Customer Reviews

Trouble Is My Business

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Count Jason Ennis: You can find the rest of the stories from "Trouble is My Business" in the Chandler title "The Simple Art of Murder." That's another great collection of the master's work. Now that's a collection worthy of a bishop kicking a hole through a stained-glass window!" -- Dashiell Millar

I bought a dog-eared copy of this collection ("Trouble is My Business") at a book sale for $1.50 a year ago. The copy I have is thick with 12 stories. I bought this copy of "Trouble is my Business" to have a better copy, but was disappointed to discover that it had been whittled down to only the final four Marlowe stories. My question is, what the hell happened to the first 8 and why is Amazon.com still describing this as a collection of 12 when there are merely four? That's not jake, fellas.

The four short stories in this book are jewels in the canon of crime fiction. Along with The Little Sister and The Big Sleep they represent the best of Chandler's work and that is saying a great deal both in the genre and 20th-century fiction itself.

Rarely do I gush about an author of so-called "genre" fiction... since I never read it. But I love Lauren Bacall and watched the movie "The Big Sleep" and thought the dialogue was great so I grabbed a Chandler book to check out his stuff. I was blown away by his evocative descriptions of people and places. Never have I had that feeling of "being there" like when I read Chandler. And since I always feel like I was born in the wrong time, I'm so happy that I found someone who can take me back just by his lush descriptions.

Reading Chandler is a joy and a treat. The clever dialouge, snappy comebacks, the slang, all the dead bodies. I'm in agreement with the other reviews that said "Red Wind" is the best story in this book, but all four stories are superior works of fiction. God bless this author!

Raymond Chanlder's collection of stories in this volume are priceless. He writes with a distinct formula, but the difference is the way he tells the story; without too much information for the reader, but just enough to keep you interested. Every Chandler story should be made into a movie.

There are those who feel that The Big Sleep or Farewell My Lovely are Chandler's best work, but I disagree. As fine as they are, they were, after all, taken from his previously published short stories. Chandler was not a novelist, really. He was writer of scenes. He could spend paragraphs describing a room, or a person, or an open field, for that matter, and leave you begging for more. These four stories are the best he had to offer. Red Wind gets the most attention, usually, thanks to the classic opening paragraph, but my personal favorite is Goldfish. The character of Carol Donovan is the most exquisitely drawn hard-boiled female since Brigit O'Shaughnessy, and the finale is as good as the finale of Shane.

This contains the best of Chandler, if not all of it is the best of Chandler. "Red Wind" is one of the most brilliant short stories not just in detective literature but in American Literature. The last few paragraphs are unspeakably precious, and give more insight into Marlowe's character than any of the novels. And the rest of the stories are fine too!

Some of the stories are better than others. I liked the last one of the four, "Red Wind" the best. Chandler wrote amazingly vivid descriptions of people's minute physical actions, their appearances, and physical surroundings. He painted visually georgeous portraits of crooks, lowlifes, and detectives. His plots were complex, too. The Lady in the Lake is also a beautiful book. Very high body count in his books and vivid corpses, too. It's no wonder he's still popular. Certainly no movie could do his work justice.

CAUTION: The edition shipped by Amazon is not the
642-page, twelve-story edition of this title advertised here and not the one which the online review discusses. For some bizarre reason, and sometime between 1988 and now, Vintage has edited out eight of the most important stories and left the reader with only four, but kept the same title: Trouble is My Business. An outrage, certainly. Don't be fooled by the bibliographic information given by Amazon: the book you receive will have only 214 pages and contain only four stories!

Perfect starting point for those wanting to find out who the hell this Chandler guy was. Way ahead of his time, and over the head of the "cat detective" set, these stories a pure gold. The John Dalmas character is essentially a raw Philip Marlowe, but the knight errant is still there, in an unrefined form. Bay City Blues, Mandarin's Jade, The Lady in the Lake...stories and attitudes that Tarrantino can only dream of ripping off. Read it now before La-La Land turns it into the next Demi Moore vehicle