Trouble Is My Business: The Raymond Chandler Library Byron Preiss Multimedia CD-ROM (WINDOWS) $49.95 Review by Norman Weinstein Featured in BBR May1995 There's something disconcerting about holding all the books of Raymond Chandler, eight all told, in one's palm in the form of a reflective plastic disc. Add to that a plentiful assortment of the author's correspondence, hundreds of photographs and maps, audio and video clips. When the feeling of sheer awe at the technological wonder fades away, what are you left with? Possible responses to that query are more complex than one might initially believe. There is the obvious space-saving benefit. Overcrowded home and public library bookshelves can be relieved. Texts can become meaningfully integrated with graphics, sound, and film in a manner never before imaginable, making the act of reading less a purely intellectual and verbal labor and more a multisensory entertainment. But how do books transferred to CD-ROM encourage any reader to mobilize the fullest range of imagination, marshal the most in-depth soundings of heart and mind? As a devout and longtime reader of Chandler's hard-boiled detective fiction, I encourage you to try this CD-ROM. If you're already familiar with Chandler's art, you'll find your appreciation enhanced through the video clips from Hollywood films and biographical data about the author offered. If you're new to Chandler, you'll appreciate being submerged in his dark vision of Los Angeles, a vision underscored by the period photographs of the landmark city sites Chandler immortalized in his books. The central image which appears on your computer monitor after you've started the program is a detective's office. We can assume it is the inner sanctum of Philip Marlowe, Chandler's archetypal detective. You're presented essentially with five options, available by pointing and clicking a mouse. "Timeline" offers Chandler's biography in a briskly written form, including his unsavory problems with drinking. "Maps" presents maps of downtown Los Angeles, with sites appearing in the fiction highlit in bright colors. Clicking on any of those sites brings you a black and white photograph of the locale. "Letters" collects various epistles from Chandler to editors and friends, each cross-referenced to one or more of his published books. "Galleries" offers three further choices. "Rogues" is a catalog of the evildoers in Chandler's books, once again cross-referenced so you can click from character description to the exact place where the character surfaces in a book. You're also offered a cartoonish illustration of the character based on Chandler's descriptions. This is one of the program's weaknesses; the comic-book style graphics trivialize the sharply etched written descriptions. It is simple to ignore them. You won't want to ignore the photographs, most looking like '40s or '50s vintage shots of L.A. with an emphasis on faded elegance and grit. The video clips are a fascinating mix. There are two terrific shorts of Duke Ellington and Art Tatum performing jazz piano, offered to give you the sense of what was playing in L.A.'s nightclubs during the time Chandler (and his characters) looked for action after dark. There are also four key episodes from the movie adaptation of The Big Sleep. Although CD-ROM technology has yet to advance to the point where a video clip fills your entire monitor, let me assure you that the electricity created by Bogart and Bacall still shocks. Even a four inch square video frame can't diminish that kind of energy. Click on "Books" and you can begin to scroll through Chandler's eight collections of novels and short stories. You're presented with various options as you do. Occasionally you can click on a button and hear a paragraph read aloud by a male or female voice, sounding appropriately smoky and mysterious. Other clicks offer places to touch upon letters, maps, photos, videos. So you have choices. You can begin with chapter one of any book and read it through, pausing just long enough to see or hear supplemental information about the author, his characters, his fictional city. Or you can begin with exploring the map and then proceed from a locale to the fiction which immortalized it. Or you can start with a character. If this sounds like great (and even intellectually enlightening) fun, it is. Even for a reader quite familiar with his fiction, Chandler's letters are a revelation. You learn about his childhood education in England, a very classically-tilted one. "I'm an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular, largely because I grew up on Latin and Greek. I had to learn American like a foreign language. To learn it I had to study and analyze it," wrote Chandler to one of his editors. "As a result, when I use slang, solecisms, colloquialisms, snide talk, or any kind of offbeat language, I do it deliberately." Deliberately he did, and his peers in getting American vernacular speech on the printed page include only the greatest: Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway. So pervasive has been Chandler's influence that you'd be hard put to find a Hollywood or TV detective story at century's end without one or more detectives talking "Chandlerese." But here the CD-ROM program is weak. It doesn't highlight the language of Chandler's character as it does the locales of his stories. Only some sections in the author's letters prompt us to pay attention to what he's doing with language. Further, as Chandler is a supreme master of refined American vernacular, he is also a great crafter of detective fiction. One of the delights of reading Chandler is entering the mind of detective Philip Marlowe as he puts the pieces of the case coherently together. I would have loved to see maps-not of L.A. architecture-but of the routes the detective followed, step by step, to solve murders (you can find an example of this in Paul Auster's nouveau-meta-detective novel, City of Glass). It would have been swell to have been a co-participant in the crime-solving business rather than just a passive appreciator of Chandler's genius. After all, computer technology is such a mystery to many of us. Why not use that mysterious technology to learn the art of how mysteries are unlocked? That is a mighty demand. This program deserves ample praise for the many wonders it generously offers. Chandler's fiction is presented in such a manner that your eyes and ears are wholly engaged by life, death, and the thin veil dividing them. Norman Weinstein is a poet and critic whose most recent book is A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Limelight Editions). He frequently writes about music for the Boston Phoenix. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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