What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.

Going into this book, I had a very surface level knowledge of "noir" as a genre, mostly gleamed from pop cultural osmosis. I liked the idea of what I thought this era of crime fiction was, and this particular title came up often as a strong example of the genre so I decided to give it a shot.

This is the first time in a long while I've picked up an "old" book outside of the literary classics you're forced to read in school. I knew going into it to expect it to be dated, and it very much is a product of its time; damn near every character is smoking indoors in every scene, multiple instances of drinking right before getting behind the wheel of a car, lusty women get slapped when being uncooperative, etc. The f-slur gets dropped a few times which was pretty jarring for me as a gay man, and there is a scene where the main character beats up a gay man (who, admittedly had brazenly committed a murder in just the previous chapter, so he kinda had it coming). On a lighter note, characters always said "okey" instead of "okay" among other strange turns of phrase that helped with the immersion of this now bygone era.

That said, this book absolutely did have what I was looking for, and in droves: rainy city streets where danger lurked around every corner, shifty characters you didn't know if you could trust, crooked cops and illicit venues hiding just behind the veneer of civilized society. I felt like I was getting hit over the head with trope after trope, but what would come across as trying too hard in a contemporary work felt natural here - that's just how things were back then.

The book is written in first person and sticks with one character throughout, who I unfortunately felt like came off as a bit of a Mary Sue. He never got flustered in tense situations (more than once he was unarmed and stared down the barrel of a gun in stride) and somehow all his gambles and leaps of logic always panned out in his favor. I know a protagonist has to be competent enough to move a story along, but I wish it felt more earned here. The story itself made up for it with enough twists and turns to keep me invested. The final reveal in the last two chapters felt like it came out of left field, like something I as a reader was never expected to piece together on my own, but I had so much fun in the middle of the book that I'm willing to overlook it.

I came into this book wanting to like it and came out the other side feeling satisfied enough to say that I did. What Raymond Chandler may have lacked in overall narrative structure he more than made up for in his prose with some of the best metaphors that I honestly should've done a better job writing down so I could include them here. Approach this book with the mentality that it is a dated-yet-authentic take on noir and you'll have a great time with it.