I’ve just finished going through the proofs of the US edition of A Mysterious Something In The Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler and it looks great. Chicago Review Press have done a great job! It will be published in the United States on 1st September this year and you can now preorder it from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
You can find the press release about the book here.
On the 17th April 2013 I’ll be in Glasgow giving a talk about Raymond Chander at the Aye Write! Festival. If you’re around, do please come along. Tickets are £8 and you can book them here.
I’ve been inspired by some much more creative Pinteresters recently to create a Pinterest board loosely based around A Mysterious Something In The Light. Check it out here.
Rather like Sony, Heineken and Omega I am jumping on the Bond bandwagon. Skyfall, which you can hardly of missed if you’re in Britain, is the latest in the Bond franchise and it’s very, very good. Along with Daniel Craig and Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes stars in the film as Gareth Mallory, chief of the intelligence committee. It’s a surname that may ring a bell for Chandler fans because Mallory was the name of Raymond Chandler’s first detective (from his 1933 story ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’). Continue reading
How often do you think about thinking? Not often, I suspect. In part this is because the act of isolating and then mapping thoughts requires a sort of focus that undermines the act in the first place. But, more importantly, it is challenging because we lack the language to describe the process of thinking in the first place. This is the problem that opens Daniel Kahneman‘s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and one of his aims is to ‘enrich the vocabulary that people use when they talk about the judgements of others…’ The book that follows is a concentrated effort to explore the process of thinking in a detailed way and it is likely that, having read this book, you won’t quite think in the same way again.
A couple of days ago the news that John Banville is writing a new Philip Marlowe story broke. I’m cautiously optimistic about the news if I’m honest and wrote a short blog for the Guardian about why. You can read the post here.
UPDATE:
If you want to read a quite different opinion, Malcolm Jones has written a piece on why it’s a very bad idea for the Daily Beast. You’ll find it here.
A little bit of Chandler news from the web today: according to reports John Banville has been commissioned to write a new Philip Marlowe novel. Banville’s crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black have been well received. It will be fascinating to see what he brings to Philip Marlowe.
Read the story here: John Banville to Revive Classic Raymond Chandler Detective – GalleyCat.
Yesterday Sean Moncreiff interviewed me about Raymond Chandler on his daytime talk radio show on News Talk 106 – 108. You can listen to the show below (the interview starts around 7 minutes and 40 seconds in).
On the 26th of July I’ll be talking about Raymond Chandler and Crime Fiction with author Oliver Harris at Owl Books in Kentish Town Road. If you’d like to come, here’s the facebook invite. There will be wine and we’ll be signing our books too.
Oliver’s debut novel, The Hollow Man, is a wonderful read and his second D. C. Belsey novel will be published in 2013 by Cape. Do check it out! I, for one, can’t wait.
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.