Classics of all kinds

For the past couple of years I've been trying to focus on classics - books I had ignored or avoided for decades. So far this year I've re-read War and Peace, and tackled Anna Karenina, the Odyssey, and A Sentimental Education, among others. (Sentimental Education is wonderful, but I gave up on Madame Bovary, grieved, exasperated and furious at Emma's heedless, self-destructive behavior.)

As always, there's a big pile of books next to the bed. Some have place markers (wait right there, Moby Dick, I'll be back) and some have yet to be opened (The Anatomy of Melancholy.)

In between, I read mysteries. Thanks to an excellent Everyman's Library edition that contains four of his best works, I've just discovered Raymond Chandler, and his private eye, Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe is the archetype - a man with rough edges, a well-hidden heart, a strict private code of honor, a gun under his jacket, an ever-present cigarette, and a taste for trouble. (Garrison Keillor's "Guy Noir" is a direct steal - especially his frowsty office in the Acme Building.)

Not that you'd want to go there, but the stories capture Los Angeles of the 40's and early 50's so vividly that you could take a shooting script off almost any page. (Chandler spent several years as a highly-paid screenwriter - and quit when he had made enough to buy an ocean view house in La Jolla.)

Here, for example, is Chandler on "art moderne" decor:

"They had half the second floor of one of these candy-pink four-storied buildings where the elevator doors open all by themselves with an electric eye, where the corridors are cool and quiet, and the parking lot has a name on every stall, and the druggist off the front lobby has a sprained wrist from filling bottles of sleeping pills.

The door was French gray outside with raised metal lettering, as clean and sharp as a new knife...Inside was a small and ugly reception room, but the ugliness was deliberate and expensive. The furniture was scarlet and dark green, the walls were a flat Brunswick green, and the pictures hung on them were framed in a green about three shades darker than that. The pictures were guys in red coats on big horses that were just crazy to jump over high fences. There were two frameless mirrors tinted a slight but disgusting shade of rose pink..."

And so on. The books are period pieces. Women wear clothes to die for, prodigious amounts of alcohol are consumed, and cigarette smoke is pervasive as the LA smog. Be prepared for some jarring stereotypes - Chandler is anything but PC.

But how can you not keep reading when a line like this turns up on the first page -

"The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back."

Oh baby.