There’s a beauty to how simple Raymond Chandler’s writing is. He begins with concrete detail, simple, well-chosen images of the seamy LA world Marlowe inhabits. Stuff like:

“We went around to the front of the apartment house and I got out. There was nobody in the lobby, no switchboard. A wooden desk was pushed back against the wall beside a panel of gilt mailboxes. I looked the names over. A man named Joe Brody had Apartment 405.”

You might wonder what’s so special about that paragraph. The answer is nothing (or almost nothing, it’s no accident that there’s nobody in the lobby and no switchboard). But Chandler writes thousands of little paragraphs like this. Over time, the steady accumulation of concrete detail results in a fully fleshed-out LA underbelly. A great setting, in other words. 

The next piece of the noir novel formula is sharp staccato sentences. Chandler never attempts to be poetic. He keeps it simple and fast on a prose level, infusing the story with energy.

The next piece is dialogue. Every line of dialogue in a Chandler novel is some combination of wittiness and brutality. Chandler has a genius for this kind of dialogue. Like this:

“Yes. I like roulette. All the Sternwoods like losing games, like roulette and marrying men that walk out on them and riding steeplechases at fifty-eight years old and being rolled on by a jumper and crippled for life. The Sternwoods have money. All it has bought them is a rain check.”

Also, sometimes characters say things that don’t make much sense but sound good in a noir-ish kind of way. Like: