New Title and A Publication Date

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It’s taken a little while but I am pleased to say my biography of Raymond Chandler will be released on the 15 July this year.This is all very exciting. It’s been tough — incredibly tough, actually — but I am very pleased with the final product and I hope you will be too.

 

Eagle eyed readers will have noticed that the title has changed. When I first had the idea for the book I wanted to call it Subdued Magic which references a letter from Raymond Chandler about F. Scott Fitzgerald. He talks about Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and worries that drinking had stopped him from fulfilling his literary potential. This was also a worry of Chandler’s and part of the thesis of my book is that Chandler was driven by this concern to write better books.

In the end though we decided that Subdued Magic was not a well known enough quote to mean anything outside the text itself and so we chose something that might have meaning to readers. In choosing A Mysterious Something In The Light as the title I think we’ve made the right decision. It is a quote that has both impact and is instantly recognizable as a being written by Chandler. Hopefully, when you walk into a bookstore, it will leap out at you. Let me know what you think.

Pre-order Something Mysterious In The Light on Waterstones.com

Chandler in The Telegraph

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Last year I contributed to a short Radio 4 documentary about Chandler called A Coat, A Hat and A Gun. It was part of their revival of Chandler and prefaced a series of radio adaptations featuring Toby Stephens as Philip Marlowe. The documentary, alas, is sitting in an archive somewhere but The Telegraph are giving away the Toby Stephen’s version (along with an earlier adaptation) all next week if you buy their paper. Details below.

Collect seven free Raymond Chandler audiobooks – Telegraph.

Death Comes To Pemberly

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I’m sure I’m not the only reader who was excited to receive P. D. James’ new novel, Death Comes to Pemberly for Christmas this year. The novel, a sequel of sorts to Pride and Prejudice, follows Elizabeth Darcy to her new home, Pemberly, in Derbyshire. Set six years after Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth is now settled and happily married to Mr. Darcy. Continue reading →

Fantasy Fiction

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For a long time I thought fantasy fiction was the sort of thing I should avoid. I didn’t like Lord of the Rings that much and I found The Hobbit a bit, well, childish. I preferred grittier or loftier things to read. Or so I thought. This week I picked up – metaphorically that is: I actually downloaded – George R. R. Martin’s A Game Of Thrones and it’s proved me wrong. It is packed with the sort of fantasy tropes I thought I’d hate – dragon eggs, dwarves, a mysterious group of creatures called The Others – but I could hardly put it down and have gone out and bought the next in the series.

Why was I so struck? Because of it’s grandeur and ambition I think. The books are about war and fantasy but they are also about politics and ambition. Modern literary fiction and crime fiction don’t really deal with the scope of politics and leadership very well and, all to often, they pay lip service to matters of state so that they fall short and feel false. In part because they are necessarily short these days: big books are harder to sell. George R. R. Martin doesn’t do this. A Game of Thrones is a fascinating examination of why men and women in positions of power act as they do and it shows the consequences of these actions in vivid detail. I can’t wait to keep reading the series and it’s great to be proven wrong too.

The High Window – Signed Edition

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I don’t think I’ve seen a signed edition of a Chandler novel before but, should you be keen to add one to your collection you can thanks to Lucius Rare Books in York. It’ll only set you back £19500 and though that sounds like a huge amount of money but that just goes to show how uncommon a thing you’d be buying. It belonged to Joe Messick, husband of Juanita Messick, Ray’s secretary from 1950 onwards. Let me know if you buy it.

Lucius Books. Rare Books, First Editions, Signed copies in York, UK.

The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler

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According to Red Magazine, The Hypnotist is ‘One of the best – if not the best – Scandinavian crime thrillers I’ve read…’, or at least that’s what the back cover of the book says. That’s a pretty strong recommendation, which ever way you cut it, but it’s also the Larsson siren call that we’re going to hear a lot of for the next few years. Any crime writer with a name that looks like there’s too many consonants in it or that has an Ø in it – ideally both – is going to be similarly beatified. At least until after David Fincher’s films come out. Continue reading →

Chandler Locations: Some Photos

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The House from Double IndemnityCahuenga Square, HollywoodThe Cahuenga BuildingIMG_0034A Door Like Philip Marlowe'sThe sign of The Bank of Italy building
The Bank of Italy Building 2The Bank of Italy BuildingChandler's Pension, Paris 3Chandler's Pension, Paris 2Chandler's Pension, Paris 1

Chandler Stuff, a set on Flickr.

For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to collect some shots of Chandler locations in Los Angeles, London and Paris. I am not the best photographer so you will have to bear with me.

Some are more famous than others – Ray’s office at the Bank of Italy building is less well known that the Deitrichson house from Double Indemnity – but I hope you find them interesting all the same. I don’t think anyone lese has taken a picture of Ray’s pension in Paris where he lived in 1905.

Via Flickr:
These are the pictures related to my research in Raymond Chandler