Penguin books run regular cover design competitions to find new talent and this year they selected The Big Sleep to test their wannabe designers. The shortlist has just been released the covers are impressive. You can see the shortlisted designers on the Guardian website here and you can see the original brief here.
Black Eyed Blonde
It was announced last year that John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, would produce a new Philip Marlowe mystery. The details at the time were thin on the ground: the publisher in the US was to be Henry Holt and it would be released sometime in the autumn was about it. We now have a title, The Black-Eyed Blonde, and a revised release date, March 2014. You can see the Amazon page here.
I wrote a blog post for the Guardian which was broadly supportive. I still think John Banville is a great choice to tackle Philip Marlowe though judgement should be reserved until the book is actually published.
The title was one of several potential pulp titles listed in Chandler’s notebooks. It has been used before, as the title of an authorised short story by Benjamin M. Schutz in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, and, perhaps more interestingly, by Erle Stanley Gardner as the title for one of his Perry Mason stories. Since Gardner and Chandler were great friends it is possible that the Chandler suggested the title to Gardner. There is no mention of it in the correspondence I have read but Ray and Cissy were occasional visitors to the Gardner ranch and perhaps, over a coffee or a whisky, the title was mentioned. We will never know, of course. Gardner’s book is long out of print so it seems, for now at least, Chandler will be associated with the title once again.
An interesting piece appeared in the Sunday Times this week about cyberwills. You can read the original article here (there’s a paywall) but, in brief, the piece discussed how different people are choosing to deal with their cyber legacy. One option is a cyberwill, a service run by Cirrus Legacy, that will release all your passwords on your death to a nominated executor. It is their job to delete, edit or archive your digital legacy as they see fit (or, perhaps, as you direct them).
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
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
This review, by Adam Mars-Jones, has been published on the Guardian website. I’ve not read Gordon Bowker’s book yet but I have it and am looking forward to it. One of the things that struck me though about this review was Adam Mars-Jones comment:
