Working With the Early Chandler Short Stories
The Raymond Chandler short story collection called Trouble Is My Business gathers material from his pre-Ph.Dilliam era output. Most of it predates The Big Sleep. The title story first appeared in Black Mask magazine in 1933. The collection as we know it was assembled posthumously, which means the order isn't necessarily what Chandler intended. That matters more than people realize. If you are looking for the definitive reading order, here is what actually happened. Chandler wrote these stories for pulp magazines between 1930 and 1933. He was paid poorly and under tight word limits. He reused characters across stories because editors didn't care about continuity. Phil Wolfson appears in "Goldfish." The private eye who later becomes Philip Marlowe shows up in different guises across several pieces. The best way to approach the book is not chronologically by publication but by tracking character development, which requires keeping a notebook or at least paying attention to which stories feature overlapping figures. I spent about three weeks compiling a reading sequence that actually makes narrative sense. I mapped out which stories reference the same clients, the same detectives, and the same geography. The resulting order is different from the published collection. It took longer than I expected because Chandler deliberately obscured these connections in later revisions.
The prose in these early stories is rougher than his novels. Chandler himself admitted this. He was still finding his voice. Some passages feel padded, especially in the longer pieces like "Kill the Blueberry" and "Nerve." The dialogue is sharper in later stories, which tells you where his trajectory was heading. You can see Marlowe emerging piece by piece, not as a fully formed character but as a series of experiments. One thing most guides skip over: the difference between the original Black Mask versions and the later collected versions. Chandler revised some stories before they made it into book form. In certain cases he tightened the prose. In other cases he changed endings entirely. If you are doing serious study, you need both versions side by side. The University of Texas Press published a scholarly edition that includes manuscript comparisons, though it is expensive and not widely available in print stores. There is a practical problem with the original collection as published by posthumous editors. The table of contents does not distinguish between Chandler's own story titles and the titles assigned by later editors. "The Doorbell Man" and "Put on Spite" carry titles that Chandler never wrote. This creates confusion when you reference specific stories in academic work or discussion. I learned this the hard way when a citation in a paper I was editing pointed to a story by its collected volume title rather than its original magazine title. The reference was wrong because the magazine version had a completely different title. I flagged it and resourced the primary publication data before resubmitting.
The Marlovian elements in these stories are recognizable but not yet polished. You get the trench coat. You get the sarcastic narration. You get the cynical worldview. What you do not get is the sustained novelistic structure Chandler would perfect in Farewell, My Lovely. These are stand-alone exercises, and they show it. Some are genuinely good detective fiction. Others read like drafts that Chandler outgrew quickly. For anyone trying to track the evolution of Chandler's style, compare "Blackmailers Don't Stitch" with "Try the Girl." Both feature PI protagonists operating in Los Angeles. Both use first-person narration. The earlier piece is heavier on action and lighter on psychological depth. The later one shows Chandler beginning to understand that the detective's internal voice matters as much as the plot mechanics. This shift happens gradually across the collection, not all at once. The difficulty with finding these stories individually online is that many sites host the collected volume rather than the original magazine texts. Archive.org has some Black Mask issues scanned, but the resolution varies and the OCR quality is inconsistent. I found that using JSTOR's digitized pulp magazine collection gave me cleaner text for most stories, though access requires institutional subscription. For free options, the Chandler Society website maintains a bibliography with links to public domain sources for the earliest stories.
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One counter-intuitive point: the stories that Chandler himself considered the strongest are not always the ones modern readers gravitate toward. In letters to editors and contemporaries, he expressed particular pride in "The Man Who Liked Dogs" and "Try the Girl." Both deal with psychological complexity rather than pure detective plotting. Readers who came to Chandler through the novels sometimes overlook these stories because they do not deliver the same kind of hardboiled action they expect. That is a mistake. Those two stories reveal more about Chandler's mature preoccupations than any number of standard pulp thrillers in the collection. The collection runs about 280 pages in most paperback editions. The pacing is uneven. If you read straight through, the middle section drags. I recommend reading two stories, stepping away, then returning. Chandler's best work in this volume benefits from brief intervals between pieces. The cumulative effect of his voice across the collection only works if you give it space to settle.
