It was officially Dashiel hammett who originated the black genre. And yet, Raymond Chandler, contemporary with Hammett, had a fundamental role in the diffusion of this genre as a derivative of the police, with the most sordid implications of what was a new type of literature determined to reveal from fiction the ins and outs of power and the underworld.
Since this genre was born with the repudiation of Literature with capital letters, ripped as a hardboiled subgenus that it was even presented through cheap "pulp" publications, consumed by popular reading classes. It is what it has ..., what today is a genre that revitalizes literature and presented with all kinds of praise and praise in the general literary market.
That's why authors like Hammett or Chandler They were as necessary, one as the other, to gain consistency and show that the trend was here to stay. Even in terms of style, Chandler achieved greater prominence than Hammett, his ability to outline the characters made for a readerly empathy, his irony and his much more violent tone with respect to the explicit plots can be considered an evolution, a first line break in the gender, an evolution.
The truth is that Chandler's arrival in literature, after 50 years he had to have as a reference that new author of the black and the popular that was Hammett, but at that mature age Chandler already knew how to give his personal stamp to the genre at the same time that he participated directly in a takeoff that nowadays Today keeps this genre at the top.
They say that the darkest genres triumph in equally dark times. Today we must be going through one of those crises of our civilization, a reflection of what Chandler and Hammett went through during the hard 30s in the United States.
Top Raymond Chandler novels
The eternal dream
Philip Marlowe, Chandler's great character, was born here. A novel halfway between the police and the black. Maintaining the investigation as the leitmotiv of the plot, the sordid aspects of the world of crime and its ties to power begin to stand out in Chandler's theme.
Hand in hand with the wayward Marlowe we travel through the typical underworlds of the now overexploited stages of the genre. A novel with a great point of authenticity, with that freshness of the incipient genre.
The contradictions and paradoxes of society begin to emerge like a distorting mirror of fiction that ultimately reflected many of the typical goings-on in high places. Novels like this also served as an awakening of anesthetized society to its most horrifying miseries.
The long goodbye
Dangerous friendships are what they have, they can lead you to glory or misery. Terry Lennox is a well-off guy, recognized and happily married (all in that plane of the reality shown by the gossip magazines towards the idealization of the civilized personalities of his society)
And yet the night Terry Lennox showed up drunk, dragging Marlowe with him, his wife was shot in the head.
The friendship then between Terry and Marlowe is called into question, with that feeling of double standards and the mask that every friend can have. Whether Terry killed his wife and went for a walk as a cover or to forget the monster that could have possessed him will be something that Marlowe will have to discern among the shadows of truth that will confront him throughout the plot.
The Lady of the Lake
Many of Chandler's fans highlight this novel as the best of his creation. In light of the time it took to write it, it can be considered that the quality-time relationship could have determined this recognition. The truth is that the change of scenery could have been the reason for this longer writing time.
It is no longer about placing Marlowe in the middle of a black-eyed hurricane advancing among high society. In this case Marlowe descends into the hells of the lower classes, of the most real and recognizable characters on the street. A woman disappears without leaving any clues; her middle-class environment seems to hide the secret of the reasons for her disappearance.
