Pickup on Noon Street

This is one of three collections extracted from The Simple Art of Murder, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1950. The collection contains four stories, all about fifty pages long. Each is set in Los Angeles, centered on a tough-guy protagonist, and told by a third-person narrator who describes actions rather than thoughts. All first appeared in detective magazines. Philip Marlowe, hero of Chandler’s novels, is nowhere to be found. In the title story, originally published as “Noon Street Nemesis” in 1936, undercover narc Pete Anglish accidentally becomes involved in a scheme to extort money from a movie star. “Smart-Aleck Kill” (1934), another tale with a Hollywood angle, tells of P. I. Johnny Dalmas’s attempts to unravel a bogus blackmail plot. In “Guns at Cyrano’s” (1936) Ted Carmady, once a detective, now a hotel owner, gets into trouble when he discovers a pretty dancer unconscious in the hallway. Gambler Johnny De Rose hopes to avoid a vengeful gangster in “Nevada Gas” (1935) but is dragged into deadly violence anyway.