Review of "Trouble is my business" by Raymond Chandler

I'm a big fan of Chandler, and while I was reading this Ruth and I were listening to an audio version of "The Black-Eyed Blonde", which is a sort of sequel to The Long Goodbye. That felt a lot like a pastiche, but after reading a succession of Chandler short stories I am more aware of how formulaic Chandler's writing for the pulps was. 

His heroes are always mopping their sweaty necks, and they get hit over the head with monotonous regularity - leaving them with similar wounds on the back of their heads. And they drink all the time from similar sized bottles, and the women are all ciphers rather than proper characters. There are two flavours of cop, corrupt and repulsive or decent and career-blocked. Once or twice I'm pretty sure that the same descriptions popped up in more than story.

I was a bit surprised, though I shouldn't have been, by the casual racism. Some characters - not fully drawn ones - are "heebs", and when there are stereotypical black people they are referred to with a series of racist epithets that I hadn't even heard before - "shine" was one. This isn't to say that race is important in Chandler's fiction (as it is say in Sax Rohmer or John Buchan), but he's certainly not better than the time he lived in.