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Metroblogging Los Angeles (Free subscription) | 08/10/2008
Swamped with work today but wanted to share this latest from the folks at Esotouric: Face it, all this talk of financial panic has harshed your mellow, chafed your hide and other pithy phrases expressing general malaise. Let your pals at Esotouric drop a little spark of hope into the darkness with this, our weekly email, [...]
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Mustard Seed Shavings (Free subscription) | 06/10/2008
Tonight on Radio 4 the contestants on The Write Stuff had to produce pastiches of famous novels in the style of Raymond Chandler. Well I have spent the whole day reworking our Parish Profile and tonight at Deanery Synod there were a few gaps for thinking so here we go. With sincere apologies and no real persons etc etc here is The Parish Profile by Raymond Chandler:Harry the Church Warden was lying...
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Slog (Free subscription) | 03/10/2008
Rumors are circling the tubes that Thomas Pynchon's next book will be a psychedelic Raymond Chandler hard-boiled noir pastiche . And it will be just 400 pages. And it will be published in August of next year. When Tom Nissley reviewed Pynchon's previous book , Against the Day , for us when it was published a year and a half ago, he had an extreme proposal for Pynchon: ...what if, instead of releasing...
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Asylum (Free subscription) | 01/10/2008
I thought I wasn’t much of a fan of crime fiction, until I remembered what great reading pleasures in recent years have come from the likes of Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith - oh, and Richard Price. Even so, I never considered Georges Simenon, even when he was reissued in the UK recently by Penguin [...]
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Crime Always Pays (Free subscription) | 30/09/2008
Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ... What crime novel would you most like to have written? There are so many of them--anything by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, especially THE BIG SLEEP, or Ross MacDonald. They were really the inspiration for writing SWANN’S LAST SONG. And maybe an unlikely candidate, DESPERADOES, by Ron Hansen, about...
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Bookgasm (Free subscription) | 29/09/2008
All the news that’s fit to capsulize! WHAT A DRAG(ON)! Anyone who wondered whether lightning could strike thrice for wunderkind fantasy author Christopher Paolini need not have wasted time and energy in doing so. His BRISINGR — book three in his INHERTIANCE CYCLE — sold 550,000 copies on Sept. 20 alone, its first day of release. That [...]
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The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 25/09/2008
For Newsweek, author George Pelecanos (The Turnaround) identifies what he thinks are the five most important crime novels of all time, though his definition of “important” isn’t entirely clear from his too-brief write-ups about each book. You can look at his list yourself, but I’ll tell you right now that Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1953) and James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss (1978)
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Sunset Over Slawit (Free subscription) | 25/09/2008
* I love a good detective story. I grew up with Raymond Chandler, I devoured Colin Dexter's Morse books when I was younger, I approve of Kate Atkinson's new direction, and I honestly keep meaning to try Rankin's Rebus (especially now he's retired)... and yet, it occurred to me the other day after reading Ruth Rendell's piece on Arthur Conan Doyle in The Guardian , I've never read any Sherlock Holmes....
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Campaign for the American Reader (Free subscription) | 22/09/2008
A panel picked the 50 greatest villains in literature for the (London) Telegraph. Number 50 on the list:Helen Grayle/Velma Valento from Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler Described as "a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window", Helen Grayle is the most memorable of Raymond Chandler's femmes fatales. She leaves a trail of bloody victims in her wake as she tries to
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Denver Post (Free subscription) | 22/09/2008
James Crumley, a revered and influential crime novelist whose hard-boiled detective tales set in Montana and other Western locales were praised for both their grittiness and the lyrical quality of their prose, has died. He was 68.
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Dialogic (Free subscription) | 22/09/2008
Chinatown Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir Hosts: Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards Robert Towne's screenplay for the 1974 film "Chinatown" tells an original story, but a story whose scope, intrigue, characters, pacing, and style owe a great debt to the work of Raymond Chandler. That said, it would be a mistake to view "Chinatown" as a simple nostalgia piece. In this tale of the fundamental--indeed...
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The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 19/09/2008
I’ve gone into print in the past saying that I believe Raymond Chandler is Ernest Hemingway with a sense of humor. It’s not that I think every book should be a giggle-fest, but there’s no dichotomy between writing a serious novel and making people laugh. Kurt Vonnegut is probably the classic example, but I like Carl Hiassen and Barry Gifford for the same reason. Elmore Leonard always makes me
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Fitness Watch (Free subscription) | 18/09/2008
Another gotta love it approach, using ADD to SUBTRACT. "On the patio of the Sunset Tower Hotel overlooking the Hollywood Hills, on the kind of sun-blinded afternoon Raymond Chandler made famous, Amanda F.* and I are eating. Well, one of us is eating. And it's not Amanda. "I took my Adderall about an hour before I got here," says the television producer as she picks at her crab salad. "If I hadn't taken...
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Liverpool Echo.co.uk (Free subscription) | 18/09/2008
2. Which American President served only 31 days?
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Blog@Newsarama (Free subscription) | 09/09/2008
Well, now we know what all those promo images were about … Marvel revealed at the Diamond Comics Distributors’ retail summit this week that they’re putting out a new line of comics called Marvel Noir. The first mini-series, featuring the X-Men, launches in February. “We wanted to use these iconic characters to tell [...]
