Turns out its on-line. At:
http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Red_Wind-Raymond_Chandler.html
and maybe elsewhere. The famous opening is:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot
dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl
your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights
like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel
the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks.
Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a
cocktail lounge.
A book I recommend to people who like this stuff is "Killer in
the Rain" a paperback collection of early Chandler short pulp
stories that he would never allow to be reprinted during his
lifetime because he had used parts of them in his later
novels. The stories are for the most part very good and, to me at
least, have an economy and power that is mostly lost in the
expanded versions of the scenes in the novels.
He was not a prolific writer; I think fewer than twenty short
stories and a handful of novels. Neither was another favorite
writer, Dashiell Hammett, who wrote relatively little stuff
especially compared to writers like Earl Stanley Gardner and many
penny-a-word pulp writers who wrote bushels of stuff. But the
quality is unsurpassed. The plots don't matter for either author,
its the scenes and dialogue; you can read them over and over and
they don't loose their edge. I have no favorite Hammett storey but
I think his best is probaby "The Glass Key" which is is closer to a
straight novel than a detective or crime story.
I can write quite a bit about both of them but its all OT here.
I also suggest "The Little Sister" for a sample of Chandler.
Probably not his best but full of quotable lines like "You can live
a long time in Hollywood without seeing the part they use in the
movies". My test to see if someone has read Chandler is to say "I
hope you don't mind riding in an old car" The answer is "Who am I
to sneer at an old car?"
--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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