My Struggle: 1. This one came highly recommended but I forget by whom. Sadly I found this memoir of Norwegian adolescence over long and rather easy to put down. Sorry.

An enthralling guide to the mystery, mastery and practice of Ping Pong, which of course led to some fine games with my son.

By way of something completely different I really enjoyed this 1964 life of the Sun King. More sympathetically written than many other biographies of this long reigning monarch who totally changed, and modernised France. His faults he recognised, and in his long life he seems always to have behaved with decency, courtesy and at the end humility. A nice portrait of an important man.

Early on in June I set off for the big adventure. It didn’t leave me much time to read at first. I traveled with the brilliant Aubyn for whom I am lost in admiration. This is a very funny satire on the Booker Prize, and committees and the vanity of authors. Seriously funny. Well worth another read.

I found calm and elegance in the sentences and quite exquisite writing within this selection. A 1957 classic collection of his visit to several monasteries. An elegant and moving defense of the monastic life, its shocking austerity and its strength in surviving and building over the centuries.

This has been a month of rediscovering Muriel Spark. I always did adore her. I think she is so funny and yet oddly modern. I love her take on characters. This binge began when I found a nice 1984 first edition on Hatchards new old first edition shelves. A really good idea that one Hatchards. This is about a man writing a monograph on The Book of Job and the complicated family interplay when his ex-wife joins a band of terrorists, leading to the unwelcome intervention of the French Police. Out of such unlikely material she makes a thoroughly entertaining and knowledgeable comedy.

This whetted my appetite and I found in Piccadilly a nice illustrated limited 1971 first edition. A squib of a book which reads like a film script. A kind of comic mystery where the entire serving staff of a prosperous mansioned Swiss upper class family conspire to do them in. Each member of the staff is carefully sketched in and it does indeed read like a fast moving movie. Perhaps it was a film script at one time, but anyway it is very funny and lovingly skirts around the gruesome murders at the heart of the story. It’s her black humour I think I find so attractive, done with such a light touch. She’s like a murderous Maggie Smith, for whom of course, she wrote the brilliant movie of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

I then found an unread paperback of a more recent 2004 novel. A surprisingly inventive tale of a not particularly happily married couple running a moving school in Switzerland, (they have to keep moving), where in Rowlands creative writing class he is challenged by the arrival of a precocious young man who is already writing a novel which, to his chagrin, is soon picked up for publishing. So this is a story of jealousy and creative envy and things might turn out very nasty indeed, but for a brilliant twist at the end which quite takes you by surprise. Mordant masterly comic writing. I love her.

I bought a lovely signed limited first edition in London and have been saving it up. I love it. He is such a great writer I can’t believe I never read these books before. Musings on evil and in particular the struggle of Cain and Abel. With surely the most wicked female character in all of literature. What a joy to discover a classic at my age.

His latest and he is a good writer but please we want Bernie Gunther and those top Nazis….

Ran out of reading and picked this up at The Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle. Always dependable and interesting short stories.

I liked this one better than...

Continuing the general thriller genre read. Not mad about this one. But the virtue of Simenon is his brevity.

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.

I found a nice 1958 first edition, second printing at Iliad. It’s a fine edition. I love the typeface which is uncredited and the design of the book. The thing that makes Chandler so seductive is he uses very few words to paint his scenes. Like Hemingway but less deliberately. Few adjectives. The simple word over the flash. And the wit. It’s like the wit of the Metaphysical poets in that it calls attention to itself. You are meant to notice the carefully chosen simile. The metaphor is metaphysical. In Playback  (his last) it’s still there, with the taut prose and the love for the missing lady. The flirtatious behaviour with the client. I’m not even sure what the title means. He is paid to pursue a lady. But it isn’t as good as others.

I then read this, his first novel, which comes in fully laden, fully charged, with Philip Marlowe precisely delineated in this tale of the mad seductive sisters of the sad rich old man in the Orchidarium and Marlowe’s compulsive habit of turning down money. This is almost the signature Chandler character keynote:  the refusal to be swayed by money. And it is important in all his books so that they are about a class struggle, between the monied classes who can afford to ignore and pay off the law and the poor schmuck whom they try and manipulate but who in the end makes the difficult choices and takes the beatings and is refused to be bribed off. The Big Sleep is death of course. Born in Chicago, educated at Dulwich College England,  what are the odds Chandler would become the archetypal noir fictional writer of California, learning his trade from Hammet’s Maltese Falcon. This his first novel is an extraordinary beginning.

This is simply a magnificent book. A classic. I had forgotten how good it is. It surmounts the genre and can be set proudly alongside any major American novels of the 20^th Century. He is a master of the art of short, simple, writing. I devoured it and, as with all great books, felt saddened as the end approached. One of the best American novels of the last century.

“This is a magnificent book. A great achievement. Wise, witty, erudite, informative, learned and honest. Carey Harrison has written a masterpiece. I can’t wait to read it again.” A superb novel from an old friend. I loved it. Please buy it and enjoy yourselves.

I was still in a holiday reading mode so I plucked from the shelf an old Thomas Perry that I was pretty certain I had read before but which I had picked up in a nice hard copy at Iliad. He didn’t let me down on re-reading this Jane Whitefield Novel. Good to have reliable authors.

I poured into this new Jim Harrison and I really enjoyed it. I find the sheer energy of his sentences and the rough reality of his characters makes me want to continue reading him, so he’s hard to put down. This one I felt I might have read before somewhere?? Finding the dead Indian in the cold waters of the lake seemed familiar to me, but he develops the story on one hand in a farcical manner, with Brown Dog’s attempts to shag and drink everything, and on the other Brown Dog seriously trying to protect the Indian Burial Site from the depravations of an academic lady whom he is boffing. Much booze and misunderstandings follow and he almost makes jail, but he is so cheerfully an outsider of society and he has such a keen eye on the media and the total misunderstandings of the Press and Police that I find him really enjoyable.