Friday, March 07, 2014
There are a lot of mornings when I miss Raymond Chandler, and a lot of evenings too. Even though we never met, there are not manymen who have had as great an influence on the way I think, and the way I expect the world to act, so even though it is pretty rare for trouble to walk through my office door in quite the way that it wandered in to Phillip Marlowe's very few days go by when I'm not expecting it. Here's something I don't expect: I don't expect that anyone else is ever going to get Chandler right, at least, not on the page.* Sorry Benjamin Black, but I don't care what Janet Maslin has to say about it-- all her review of The Black-Eyed Blonde tells me is that Janet Maslin doesn't know much about Raymond Chandler.
*On film it's a different story. Howard Hawks understood Chandler, and so did Robert Altman.
// posted by Bill @ 12:38 PM 
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