dangerblond.org (Free subscription) | 07/17/2008
Went home, studied for the bar, went to bed early… no wait! That’s not what I did. Tonight was book club. We read “Farewell, My Lovely” by Raymond Chandler. We met at Susan’s new boyfriend’s house and swam in the pool. Pics and comments coming soon to a blog near you.
cold fury (Free subscription) | 07/16/2008
So Glenn’s been writing about bad cops for a while now, up to and including this post. I sent him an e-mail earlier this morning on the topic, with a Raymond Chandler quote, which he saw fit to post as an update. I’ll use almost any excuse I get to post anything Chandler wrote here, [...]
The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 07/15/2008
Chicago seems intent on burnishing its rep as a place fond not only of crime but of crime fiction--and the genre’s multiplying fans. Earlier this year, it chose Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye as the subject of its citywide reading program, “One Book, One Chicago.” Now, the magazine Time Out Chicago, together with publisher Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and the Intelligentsia coffee shops is
KR Blog (Free subscription) | 07/14/2008
I’m back in my hometown, Baltimore, for the first time in a year, and I can’t stop looking at my old bookshelves. All the reasons I decided to become a poet are here: James Baldwin, Raymond Chandler, Richard Wright, Ayn Rand, Isabelle Allende, Monopoly strategy books, Natasha Saje, Daniel Defoe, Angela Ball–strange reasons, maybe, now. But [...]
Churbuck.com (Free subscription) | 07/02/2008
Institute for Justice: First Amendment Cases: Texas Computer Repair Thanks to Fester for this WTF weirdness. Texas wants computer repair technicians to be licensed Private Investigators. Somehow the hardboiled world of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett doesn’t jibe in my mind with a guy in a shortsleeved shirt swapping power supplies on a beige desktop. Then again, [...]
Crime Always Pays (Free subscription) | 06/29/2008
A surreal, affectionate homage to the private eye detective popularised by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Jack Kairo is a one-man show which rewards fans of the hardboiled school of crime writing in particular. The hard-drinking and wise-cracking Kairo (Simon Toal, right) steps out of a case – literally, a suitcase – and into a case that involves the murder of a General Rumsfeld, the solving...
MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 06/11/2008
Variety reported that Jonathan Ames's "Bored to Death" just got greenlit by HBO. The pilot will center on a Brooklyn writer who nurses a painful breakup by acting out his dream to live as a character out of a Raymond Chandler novel. As a result, he finds a new lease on life by offering up his services as an inexperienced private eye. "The pilot is based on a short story I wrote, 'Bored to Death',...
The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 06/11/2008
When people ask me, “Which famous writers or books have influenced you'” I tend to come out with the usual suspects. Raymond Chandler, James Lee Burke, Elmore Leonard. Add to those Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992) by Danish writer Peter Høeg--the first half of possibly the best thriller ever written. Perhaps surprisingly for a Brit, I don’t cite either Arthur Conan Doyle (whose Sherlock
The Telegraph India (Free subscription) | 06/07/2008
When cardboard lovers become papier mâché villains, "the simple art of murder" that Raymond Chandler speaks of becomes too contrived. Theatrician's latest production, Agatha Christie's Towards Zero, looks slick but leaves the audience dissatisfied. Originally written in the form of a novel, Towards Zero was dramatized by Christie in collaboration with Gerald Verner in 1956. It is among her weaker whodunnits,...
librarian.net (Free subscription) | 06/06/2008
Hi there. I’m heading down to RILA this rainy morning but I wanted to mention for those of you who are ALA-bound and looking for activities, my pal Kim Cooper [from SaveLAPL fame] will be leading a full-day Raymond Chandler bus tour heading through Los Angeles on Tuesday July 1st. More details on the website. [...]
Metroblogging Los Angeles (Free subscription) | 06/03/2008
The first time I caught a film at Cinefamily was last Friday. The film was Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I scurried over Hollywood from Burbank after work to meet a friend at the excellent repertory theater on Fairfax (also known as The Silent Movie Theater) and spent the next [...]
Times Online (Free subscription) | 06/01/2008
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” Nobody can sum up a woman’s allure like Raymond Chandler can, and, boy, do we all know what he is talking about. Womanliness - that which has caused kingdoms to change hands, tragedies to unfold and fortunes to be won and lost - is a potent force. From Cleopatra to Princess Diana, Helen of Troy to the Duchess of Windsor,...
Today's Blog Music (Free subscription) | 05/20/2008
in post Daily Downloads (Amos Lee, Phoebe Kreutz, and more) from Largehearted Boy .
Semicolon (Free subscription) | 05/19/2008
Expanded vocabulary from reading this classic noir detective novel: loogan: a man with a gun squibbed off: killed lammed out: ran away frail: woman leery: risky peeper: private detective Useful phrases and wisecracks: “Shake your business up and pour it. I haven't got all day.” “Hold me close, you beast.” Actually, that one came from an inept seductress in chapter twenty-three, and I thought [...]
Word Around the Net (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
"You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell." -Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep There is a website called The Art of Manliness that purports to be a daily guide to masculinity in the 21st century, with
