The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell, 2017

This was a holiday, ‘I need something to read that isn’t too serious’ read, but to be honest it is not the kind of novel I would usually bother with, even notwithstanding the endorsement of the Zoe Ball Book Club. This is one of those novels where the book cover and blurb tell you almost everything you need to know:

“When newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband’s crumbling country estate, The Bridge, what greets her is far from the life of wealth and privilege she was expecting . . .”
I appreciate that sometimes dramatic clichés are hard to avoid. But this novel embraces them with ardour.
In Jane Austen’s satire on this genre, ‘Northanger Abbey’, the heroine Catherine Morland describes why she is not frightened to be visiting the Abbey, despite her romantic fancies:
“Besides, it has never been uninhabited and left deserted for years, and then the family come back to it unawares without giving any notice, as generally happens“.
You have guessed it, this is precisely what happens at the opening of ‘The Silent Companions’, when with her husband dead just weeks after their marriage, Elsie returns to the spooky ancestral home with only her husband’s cousin for company. Or so she thinks. The husband’s cousin has been dispossessed by the marriage and siring of an heir, so one would expect her to be a figure of suspicion when the inevitable mysterious and eerie events start to occur. But of course that never happens.

You have to wonder whether Austen would have thought her satirical observations on the gothic novel would remain relevant 200 years on?
Locked doors, painted wooden figures that bear a striking resemblance to other characters and whose eyes follow you around the room, a moody housekeeper, sullen villagers, mental asylum patients struck dumb with fear, things that almost literally go bump in the night – there really isn’t a cliché left unmined in this gothic horror story. Oh, not forgetting the shop that mysteriously appears and then can’t be found the next day – isn’t that borrowed from ‘Gremlins’?

The author never quite decides if she is writing a crime novel or a supernatural thriller. There is an entirely predictable, common-sense whodunit ending in which we are led to believe that the novel’s events are all wrapped up, but a moment’s consideration reminds the reader that many of those events have in fact not been explained, and could only have had a supernatural explanation, making the attempt to provide a realistic explanation redundant.

It will be clear by now this is not a recommended read. It is lazy generic fiction and a waste of the reader’s time.

The City and the City, by China Meiville, 2009

When reading this review, if you do, please remember my policy on spoilers – which is that I will probably use them. I don’t do so deliberately, I just find it hard to write comprehensively about something I have read without writing about the things that other readers might consider spoilers (bearing in mind of course that there is no universally agreed definition of what constitutes a spoiler in the first place). ‘The City and the City‘ is particularly difficult to review without reference to the central concept. If you avoid blurbs, plot summaries, reviews, tv adaptations etc, and read this novel without any preconceptions (I would agree by the way that a ‘pure’ approach to reading any novel is impossible – the reader will be influenced by their knowledge of the author, the cover illustration, etc) you become slowly aware that there is something unusual about the setting.

The central concept in this otherwise orthodox police procedural novel is extraordinary. Inspector Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad in the central European country of Besźel, investigates the murder of a foreign student. The victim was involved in debates about the complex relationship between Besźel and its neighbour and rival Ul Qoma. From early on there are some unusual aspects of Borlu’s narration. He talks about ‘unseeing’ a passerby, with no explanation of what this means. Borlu is Beszel born and bred, so his instincts as a native are deeply ingrained – he sees nothing out of the ordinary in what follows. Slowly, the true nature of Beszel and Ul Qoma’s unique relationship is revealed. The cities occupy the same geographical space, but preserve their separation through rigid adherence to ‘unseeing’ – being aware of but refusing to acknowledge the existence of the other – its buildings, vehicles, citizens and so on. This practice is enforced by a sinister entity known as Breach. Separation is assisted by differences between the city and the city – clothing, architecture, even gait. Residents are taught from childhood to recognise things belonging to the other city without actually seeing them. Ignoring the separation, even by accident, is called “breaching” – a serious and swiftly punished crime.

I suspect Meiville drew inspiration for this separate but the same concept from the situation in the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 90s, where neighbouring countries fought bitterly over small areas of land. This separation could have arisen from this kind of conflict, although we are told it dates to before recorded European history. Inevitably there are many complications to this way of life. The cities have areas where ownership is unclear, and where people of both cities walk and drive alongside one another. The only way one can legally pass from one city to another is through border control – even though such journeys involve returning to the same physical space one has just left.

Meiville’s construction of this world is thorough – he thinks through all the practical aspects (what if there is a traffic collision between cars from the different cities?) – this is not just a whimsical concept but a fact of everyday life for the citizens of the two cities, which make investigation of cross-border crime a logistical and conceptual nightmare.

Within this world, the murder investigation unfolds, and it is not a criticism to say that in this respect the novel is a traditional police procedural. Suspects are interviewed, other crimes are discovered, hidden forces interfere with the investigation, all in a routine manner. This is not of course a simple murder, even if where it was committed had been a less complex environment. A conventional buddy relationship develops between Borlu and his Ul Qoma partner, and Borlu’s sidekick does what every good sidekick does, providing back-up and insight without stealing the limelight.

In crossing genre boundaries, any author runs the risk of pleasing fans of neither original genre. Meiville does what he can to mitigate this risk, but his weird fiction fans are the most likely to have been disappointed – other than the setting or context, this is a very recognisable world. I really enjoyed it, and while I recognise it is probably not typical of Meiville’s work, I will be interested to see to what extent that is true, or whether my fairly uninformed impressions of this author are correct.

His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet, 2015

Subtitled Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae

(NB contains lots of spoilers)

The Guardian described this novel as “a slippery creature indeed”. Having read this and some other reviews, I was expecting a modernist novel, in which the unreliable narration leaves the reader to piece together their own version of what ‘really happened’. ‘His Bloody Project’ undoubtedly has some superficially modern features, most notably the use of apparently ‘found’ documents relating to the murders to construct the narrative. But don’t be either put off nor excited by this, because lurking behind this mildly unconventional façade is what I found to be in many ways a very traditional crime novel.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, 1966

Read in Abacus edition.

This non-fiction novel (Capote’s term for it) describes the murder of the Clutter family, a mid-Western American family, and the subsequent arrest, conviction, and execution of their killers, Hickock and Smith.

It’s a banal and senseless murder, and despite the meticulous way it is reconstructed by Capote he never really gets close to explaining why the killing took place. The motive is one sense is quite simple – theft, and an attempt to cover their tracks – no witnesses – but it takes a certain deranged quality to murder four helpless people ‘in cold blood’, and it is that aspect of the killings that remains elusive. Towards the end of the book Capote hints at the possibility that Smith, the actual killer of all four family members, was triggered to commit the killings by some resemblance between the first of the family to die, the father, Herb, and an authority figure in his (Smith’s) past, but the idea is only mentioned in passing and is not followed through.

A non-fiction novel is arguably a contradiction in terms – novels are by their nature works of imagination. Of course many novels take as their starting point something factual, either in the public domain or the author’s personal lives, so in one sense Capote simply takes this idea and develops it. But the reader is left uncertain as to what extent the description of events – including detailed conversations, and accounts of the characters’ thought processes – are ‘as imagined’ by Capote, and which are based upon interviews with the participants and other research. The novel is sub-titled ‘A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences’, and in a short acknowledgements section Capote claims “All the material in this book not derived from my own observation is either taken from official records or is the result of interviews with the persons directly concerned, more often than not numerous interviews conducted over a considerable period of time”. But apart from this acknowledgement, Capote erases any trace of himself from this novel – there is never any mention of “when I spoke to him” or “later he told me that…”. In reality this invisibility is misleading – his presence would have had some impact, particularly long after the crime when the appeals process was coming to a conclusion. The ‘support’ of a celebrity writer would have had an impact, and of course people more cynical than me have pointed out that Capote had an interest in the final execution of Smith and Hickock, giving him the ending his novel needed.

My instinct is that wherever possible Capote stuck to the facts, as they could be verified. The killing is banal and there is no attempt to sensationalise it – in some ways quite the opposite, because Hickock’s sexual perversions are glossed over, the executions when they finally come, is over in three or four pages, and while the murders are described in detail, this is done with as much sensitivity as possible in the circumstances. Capote tells the story of the killings murders themselves through Smith’s confession – had the murders been described by anyone else the terror of the victim’s would have been unavoidable, but because he was simply unable to share any real empathy with them it is (slightly) easier to bear.

Without wishing to labour the point, I find the form of this novel uncomfortable. Documentary recreations of crimes, where the known events are supported by evidence of one form or another (‘according to a witness statement’, ‘in evidence, Smith said’, the coroner’s report said, etc.) allow the reader to judge for themselves the extent to which this the report is accurate. Similarly, imaginative recreations where the author attempts to step into the shoes of the characters and capture what it must have felt like to be present and involved in the crime, are another legitimate form. But this is a halfway house between these two forms, where some of the scenes are fictional (Dewey, the lead investigator, is shown at the end of the novel meeting one of Nancy Clutter’s friends at her grave – he subsequently denied that ever happened) and others likely to be based upon conversations and interviews with the participants where their accuracy can never be tested. If the end result gave us an insight into crimes of this kind then the effort could perhaps be justified – but eventually all we learn is the banality of evil.

The Good German by Joseph Kanon

It is, I am fairly sure, just a coincidence that the books I have been reading recently have been about the second World War, and more specifically its aftermath. (Or is it? Is there something going on in my subconscious that is leading me to these books? Probably not!) This novel, a present, tells the story of a journalist arriving in Berlin shortly after the end of the war in Europe, but before the end of the Pacific war. I am sure it is revealing that despite having followed this character’s adventures over 500 or so pages, I can’t tell you his name. He is strangely unengaging for a first person character who gets the girl, solves the riddle, stands up to the bad guys, and does the right thing by war survivors. We are presumably intended to think of him as a hero, but despite the many attempts at realism I never once thought of him as a real person.

Arriving in Berlin he stumbles across a murder, which in time honoured fashion no-one else thinks is worth pursuing. He doggedly chases down the culprits all the while reigniting a pre-war romance, getting stories for his magazine, and observing impassively the destruction and despair all around him. This takes time, and a large supporting cast of characters who one by one are ticked off as potential suspects or bumped off along the way in a manner which removes all possible suspense. That’s not the interest of the book, of which surprisingly there was some. Berlin in mid to late 1945 was obviously devastated by the Allies bombardment and subsequent capture, and the behaviour of survivors is described here with some originality. Nazi scientists are hunted by the US and Russians, and their war crimes glibly overlooked. Other Nazis buy “forgiven” status from Jewish survivors, not because they are innocent but because the survivors are desperate for money. The huge differences between the surviving Berliners, desperate for shelter, food and water, live alongside Allied troops who seemingly want for nothing, creating a black market which is the origin of the murder. This is a complex environment for a murder mystery/thriller, where the foreground is less interesting that the context.

Both this novel and “Look Who’s Back” provide an interesting commentary on the question of why Germany fought to the bitter end, leading to the destruction of Berlin and other German cities, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. The Hitler of “Look Who’s Back” is clear – the punishment for losing the war is death – the Reich needed to be destroyed because it was unworthy, because it lost the war. This was not a long rearguard action hanging on for the super-weapon that never emerged, but a protracted suicide. Of course that is not how most Germans saw it. The perspective most often articulated in Kanon’s Berlin is that ordinary, good, Germans were the victims – that their cities were firebombed, their citizens targetted, long after the point they could effectively defend themselves, their women raped by rampaging Russians and others, then starved and frozen once the war ended. There is little or no understanding from Kanon’s good Germans that they are reaping what they sowed. It is unusual from a novel of this kind to have such a finely balanced discussion of difficult issues like this, and it sits uncomfortably with the other, much more conventional elements of the novel. (Incidentally, Anthony Beevor’s “Berlin” is very good on this point).

If you enjoy complex, and long, murder mysteries in the Le Carre tradition, you might enjoy this.

Supplementary: The Black-eyed Blonde – Benjamin Black (2)

A lot of the reviews of this novel praised the plotting, one going so far as to say it was better than Chandler’s. My impression on a first read was that the plot of the Black-eyed Blonde was fairly linear and straightforward, and Marlowe is something of a passive observer of the narrative rather than someone who shapes it. All, in fact, very un-Chandleresque. But it is worse. I had a spare half hour on the tube yesterday, and with nothing else to read I looked again at the first chapter of this novel. What I was looking for is whether Black’s attempts at Chandler’s imagery were successful or not. Broadly they are. Inevitably there are some misses, but an above average number of hits. I won’t quote any here because out of content they can look weak, but that’s not what I wanted to write about anyway.

The plot of the Black Eyed Blonde is simple enough. Marlowe is asked by the title character to find a missing person, Nico Peterson. After a few fruitless lines of enquiry, Marlowe asks the police if they know where Peterson is, and the information is quickly returned – he died in a hit and run accident a few weeks earlier. When Marlowe tells his client this her response is (end of chapter 4) “I know”. Marlowe is so shocked by this he actually has to ask her to repeat herself, which is in itself completely un-Marlowe like.

So why did she ask Marlowe to investigate Peterson’s disappearance when she knew that he had died in a hit and run accident. The answer she offers is that she saw Peterson alive a few weeks later, and therefore believed the accident was a fake, or a case of mistaken identity. But this doesn’t explain why she withheld this information from Marlowe when she first commissioned the case. What possible reason could she have had for not just omitting this vital information, but actively misleading him? When asked in chapter one when she first realised he was missing she tells Marlowe “I telephoned him a number of times and got no answer, Then I called at his house. The milk hadn’t been cancelled and the newspapers had been piling up on his porch”. Why would she do that if she knew he had been “killed” in a hit and run. Even if this was after the subsequent sighting, why not tell Marlowe this. I suppose you could argue she was testing Marlowe’s powers as an investigator, but someone’s death in an unsolved hit and run would be a matter of public record. The fact that Peterson’s neighbour has not heard of his “death” is unconvincing as well – in reality news like that would be in the local paper and spread quickly.

The simple reason why she misleads Marlowe is so that the author can have this plot twist. And that’s not good enough – you can’t simply have characters behave illogically just to have dramatic chapter endings. In the same way the mexican thugs would not have kidnapped, tortured and killed Peterson’s sister, but left Marlowe alive to identify them. We much later learn that Clare Cavendish, the eponymous blonde, is unwittingly helping drug smugglers who want to track Peterson down, he having stolen some of their drugs. All the more reason why they would want Marlowe to have all the available information, not waste time finding out things they already know.

This is just not good enough. Chandler’s plotting was always complex and yes, sometimes a bit besides the point. He did weld together short stories, and knowing that you can sometimes see the join. (I defy anyone not knowing that to spot, for example, that the Big Sleep is two separate narratives shunted together). But his characters never behaved irrationally like this just to engineer a plot twist, or a “dah, dah, da!!” moment.

The Black-eyed Blonde by John Banville/Benjamin Black

This should so have been a great find. A new “Philip Marlowe” novel written by John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. Raymond Chandler is one of my favourite novelist (looking back, I see I put him at number 5 in my top ten, which is there or thereabouts), and John Banville is a Booker prize winner. The Sea, which I reviewed back in June 2012, is an ultimately flawed novel but which showed a lot of craft in its writing. O it took me a few seconds to decide to buy this. The combination should have worked – Chandler is not that hard a writer to imitate, he has so many recurring motifs, it almost writes itself. There’s the sultry blonde who turns up unannounced at Marlowe’s office, and offers him a job without telling him the whole truth; the slug on the back of the head that takes Marlowe out at a key moment, the stumbled upon body, the drugged drink, and so on. The language is tougher to copy – highly distinctive, of course, but elusive, as Banville finds here.

There were, however, looking back, some warning signals. For a start there was the strange “John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black”. I can understand the use of a pseudonym, the creation of a different writing persona to make it clear to the readers that they can expect a different experience – but “writing as” is really having your cake and eating it, saying “but it’s really me, Booker prize winning stylist here after all”. Then there was the ambiguity about the relationship with Chandler’s estate – is this an authorised use of his intellectual property or not? There is nothing on the cover to indication this, although it seems obvious it must be. On investigation, it appears this is an authorised use of Chandler’s copyright, but by a company which has bought this off Chandler’s estate, rather than something approved by surviving family members. So done for commercial gain alone. Then there is the title – The Black Eyed Blonde. There’s some ambiguity there – are her irises black, or, in the more traditional use of the term, has she bruised eyes? It is in fact the former, although do people really have black irises? In a short note at the end of this novel Banville explains that this title was in Chandler’s notes as a potential title for a future novel – but he didn’t use it for a reason I suspect. However fanciful Chandler’s imagery or imagination, there was a truth at the heart of it that is lost here.

 

So is this a parody, a tribute, an imitation? Was Banville taking a break from “proper” writing and having a bit of commercially rewarding fun – slumming it – writing something in the style of Chandler?  I have a horrible suspicion that this was not done with the appropriate respect for Chandler/Marlowe, but was simply an attempt to screw some more money out of the estate. This cynicism might be harsh, but the real test is whether the novel works or not. Is it a success as an effective imitation of Marlowe? Can you forget, even for a moment, that you are reading a 21^st century recasting of the genre? I’m afraid not. For a start, the novel lacks the pace of true Marlowe. He was a genuinely good detective – the detective here really does very little investigative work beyond asking police contacts for help, and interviewing, ineffectively, some obvious suspects. Loose ends are not followed up, whereas the real Marlowe would have tracked them down in a night. So for example a dead body is found to fake someone’s death – who was the body, was his death a convenient coincidence, or a murder? This question is never asked, whereas true Marlowe would have cared about this casual brutality. Banville’s Marlowe wastes huge amounts of time waiting for the case to break of its own accord, rather than tracking down leads. True Marlowe is also a man of deeply held convictions, and while this version does protect his client’s confidentiality, he speaks far too freely about the case to people he has no reason to trust. This Marlowe is frankly a bit slow – it takes him an age to realise his drink has been drugged, long after the reader has worked it out. Chandler’s novels are complex and sometimes confusing – this was straightforward and simple. There are other false notes struck – why does the black-eyed blonde not tell Marlowe that the man she sends him to find, Nico Peterson, was believed to have died in a hit and run incident several weeks earlier. Her reluctance to tell him this aspect of her story serves no purpose whatsoever. Later when Marlowe and Peterson’s sister are held up by two sinister Mexican thugs, they knock him unconscious, then kidnap, torture and kill her. Why would they leave Marlowe alive if they are such vicious killers?

 

I wonder – in 75 years will people be writing Harry Potter novels where a grown–up Harry goes back to Hogwarts to investigate mysterious goings on?  Would that be as wrong as this feels? While I appreciate that there are plenty of examples where great authors works are completed and their worlds reimagined in a different context – Young James Bond for example, the completion of the Hitchhikers sextet, and the Sherlock Holmes tributes – I can’t think of a single one that has been genuinely successful. You wouldn’t do this for any other art form, and I am not convinced it is respectful to the original authors. Chandler didn’t write enough Marlowe novels – he couldn’t have done – but he left us with enough to make novels like this pointless, and a bit tawdry.

Book review: The Drop by Michael Connolly

The Drop sees the return of Harry Bosch, Michael Connolly’s grizzled Los Angeles police detective. Bosch is said to have seen action in Vietnam, and this novel appears to be set in the present day, so he presumably is getting on in years. Having retired and returned to work he now extends his service using a deferred retirement scheme – which gives us the title of the book. Yes, that’s right, a police story using an acronym for deferred retirement as its title. Of course there is an intended pun, in that the primary investigation in the novel is a suspected suicide by high rise jump. There is a sub-plot involving a DNA hit on a long unsolved murder which is integrated nicely into the overall structure – Connolly is a very experienced writer with 25 or so books to his name, and it shows.

This is a guilty pleasure – there is no pretence at anything other than entertainment, and I have to be honest I found it a very easy, undemanding, and enjoyable read. Bosch conforms to the stereotype defined by Raymond Chandler long ago, a loner who struggles with relationships and authority, determined to do what is right irrespective of the personal cost:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world….. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness….If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. ” (The Simple Art of Murder)

That captures Bosch, and many other fictional detectives, so well.

In any long running series there are some challenges for the writer – how to avoid repeating yourself and being predictable while at the same time working within the recognised structure – avoiding gimmicks like relocating to different locations, (although the last Bosch novel did end up in Hong Kong). As a police detective there are constraints on where and how Bosch can work, limiting the writer’s scope for innovation. And within these constraints you can only have so many angry confrontations with impatient supervisors, interrogations of over-confident suspects, intuitive breakthroughs from tiny clues, etc, etc. Connolly seems to have recognised these issues, but shrugged and thought people will keep buying the books so no real need to keep things fresh.

As a result this novel has a reheated feel, one of Connolly going through the motions. Bosch has a short term romance – but guess what, work gets in the way. City Hall politicians conspire to frustrate his investigation. A killer wonders who will play him in the film of his exploits. And a suspected suicide turns out to be, guess what, a suicide! There’s nothing here to surprise or challenge the reader, but it is clear that the reader, even this one, sometimes wants plain undemanding fare. Same again please.

Connolly suffers from the comparison with Chandler, as every crime writer would, but if you want a murder story that aspires to be something that will just pass away a train journey, it’s Chandler every time.

Book review: House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz

I would have thought that pastiches of the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, of which this claims to be the first authorised by the Conan Doyle estate, would be one of the easiest to pull together. Each of the stories follows a fairly rigid pattern, and there are a series of boxes for any author to tick – Holmes with violin, tick, cocaine addiction referenced but not indulged, tick, London fog, rattling coach drives, cheeky Cockney urchins , Mrs Hudson making tea, Mycroft being inscrutable, and of course the dazzling deductions based on flimsy evidence (but never guesses, oh no). And with Dr Watson you have the most affable and gentle of narrators, always comfortably behind the pace, leaving the reader a sense of superiority – we can work out which is the Holmes in disguise character before he does, how the locked room is escaped from, etc. Horowitz sinks into the comfort of these clichés with an almost audible sigh, and the reader is granted 400 pages of predictable, unchallenging nonsense.

 

Another Conan Doyle tradition that Horowitz follows religiously is the tendency to not bother too much with plausibility. Raymond Chandler in the Simple Art of Murder famously described the Holmes stories as “mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue” and elsewhere, although I can’t find it now after at least five minutes on Google, picks apart the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles, pointing out just how many absurdities and improbabilities the plot contains. Horowitz maintains this tradition with a plot that depends utterly on people being in the right place at the right time – for example Holmes’s escape from prison depends on him bumping into a prison doctor who he knows from a previous case, not to mention the bizarre behaviour of the Irish gangster who marries a man to exact revenge upon him, which as a plan has a number of flaws in it (ie a dependence on him being gay and thus not want sex with you, but prepared to marry you nonetheless!)

There is some updated knowingness here – we meet Moriarty, but he doesn’t play a part in the plot – and the concern for the underclass (for example the street children Holmes uses as his eyes and ears in back streets) missing in the Conan Doyle. Watson’s narration is set many years in the future, after Holmes’s death, which as a device adds nothing to the novel. As a deviation from the Conan Doyle tradition of having a near contemporaneous narration this seems a strange one to choose.

Nevertheless, Horowitz does a competent job throughout, without at any stage dazzling or impressing – the nearest he comes is during the unveiling of the villain at the close, which as described above doesn’t stand up to much if any scrutiny. In the back of my mind throughout the read was the way the recent TV series had grasped all of these conventions but not proven shackled by them, managing to remain true to the spirit of the original but reinventing Holmes for a modern generation. The House of Silk suffers significantly by comparison

 

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The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, 1939

Chandler is one of my favourite writers – top 5 at least, and pretty much everything he published is consistently readable. As such I don’t really have a favourite novel of his but if forced to choose it would probably be “The Big Sleep”. This is Chandler at his sublime best. Philip Marlowe, his iconic hard boiled detective, a loner, is the quintessential private eye, the model on which so many detectives down the ages have been based upon. We see the action through his detached, sardonic perspective, although even then many things we are left to work out for ourselves.

The principal attraction of these novels – “The Lady in the Lake”, “Farewell my Lovely”, “The Long Goodbye”, “The Little Sister” – all classics – is not the plotting, tight though this is, but the prose – Chandler had an ability to craft a phrase like few others. Take this opening from “The Big Sleep” for example, probably one of the best ever written:

“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

Doesn’t that make you want to stop and go and read the book itself? Go on, I won’t be offended. The dark little clocks are a great touch.

The plot is extremely complex, not that it matters. Marlowe is employed by the ailing General Sternwood to investigate a small blackmail problem. In doing so Marlowe gets involved with pornographic book lending (which in today’s world is almost cute), gambling, boot-legging, gangsters, and several murders. The story flies along at such pace that you don’t actually spot the join – the book was originally two shorter stories, welded together to make the novel. This is done with such craftsmanship that you don’t notice unless you are looking for it – and even then it doesn’t matter a jot. (End of chapter 19 if you are interested – everything is tied up neatly at that point with only the missing persons investigation, which Marlowe isn’t really supposed to be conducting, outstanding).

If you haven’t read Chandler before you are in for a treat. This is as good a place to start as any – it’s his first Marlowe novel. In Philip Marlowe we have one of the great literary characters – as well realised and fully rounded as any I can think of. Some Christians exhort people to ask “What would Jesus would do?”. With all possible respect to these individuals, I often wonder whether “What would Marlowe do?” would offer better advice. That won’t mean too much if you haven’t read the books, so you know what to do now, don’t you?