Chandler’s inspiration. A short re-read. Nick and Nora Charles are a delightful couple, but boy do they drink. Hardly a page goes by without another cocktail. It’s an ok yarn and I liked the period NY milieu but I think Chandler’s prose is way better. I shall read further because I always liked Hammett.

The Los Angeles of Philip Marlowe. Chandler’s sense of place is very fine. This is a handy guide to some of the places featured in some of the novels.

This is a first edition in this form which is a republishing of The High Window under the film title with which they released it. It’s dated August 17 1947 from The World Publishing Company who seem to specialise in publishing books of movies.  It has yellowing paper but still a nice original cover with pictures of Gorge Montgomery and Nancy Guild. I have to say the novel itself I found disappointing. Maybe one shouldn’t binge too much….

To cheer myself up I bought a First Edition of this book from Mystery Pier Bookshop, which is a fabulous place just behind Book Soup on Sunset that sells only First Editions. This 1949 First Edition with original slip cover was a delight to read and I love the way he writes sexy, seductive, but psychotic women. Here there are three major female characters in the tale of little shy innocent Miss Nobody in from the mid-West searching for her dear missing innocent brother who has become mixed up in blackmailing a mobster. No surprise he turns up dead.

Oddly in the midst of my Chandler binge came this new Philip Marlowe detective novel under the name of Benjamin Black, which is the pen name used by John Banville for writing some rather good thrillers in the detective form. Now he turns to Chandler. It’s a difficult choice. There is no doubt Banville/Black can write anything he wants, but I do wish he wouldn’t. It’s not that he doesn’t make a reasonably good stab at writing Chandler, but he doesn’t totally get the brevity or the wit of the writing, and he flounders a little with what Chandler does effortlessly, capturing the geography and micro-climate of Forties Los Angeles. There are, of course, glaring inconsistencies, the British pub with the picture of the young Queen is from a way later LA, and there would only have been a young Queen anyway then, but these things are fine. It’s just not Chandler. It’s clever pastiche, which is dangerously close to parody. He’s a clever bugger though.