Noir Town

Such delicious similes--figurations familiar, via parody and imitation, to any American 8-year-old--are the signature flourishes of Chandler's performance, down-home rococo. In Farewell, My Lovely, we get a garish and hulking gangster looking "about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." The goon enters a bar to be greeted by "a sudden silence as heavy as a water-logged boat." His affairs are mixed up with those of a good-looking blonde, specifically, "a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."

There's a lot of plot in Chandler novels, which is not the same as saying they're heavily plotted. Marlowe typically takes on a case, exchanges crisp one-liners with a range of Technicolor stock figures, and gets a lot of pistols pointed at him. In Chandler's hands, the hard-boiled detective story is less about detection than hard-boiledness. His triumph was to mint a language that slums and soars at once.

NEW in Paperback

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NEW in Paperback

THE STORIES OF BREECE D'J PANCAKE (Back Bay, $13.95, first published in 1983) The 26-year-old Pancake committed suicide in 1979, four years before the publication of these elegiac stories.

ZIGZAGGING DOWN A WILD TRAIL Bobbie Ann Mason (Modern Library, $11.95, 2001) Characters with names like Jazz, Darlene, and Charger dance through Mason's latest batch of stories about small-town America.

ROAD TO PERDITION Written by Max Allan Collins, art by Richard Piers Rayner (Pocket, $14, 1998) Kids, hoods, fedoras, guns, and blood spill from the graphic novel that inspired the new movie.