I’ve been binging on Raymond Chandler for the last little while. I read The Big Sleep whilst in Timor-Leste, followed by Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye, and am now most of the way through The High Window. Nothing has had the pyrotechnics of the first yet, though I love them all. They are so sad and bleak and funny. He is an incredibly visual writer, too, you can really imagine how he pictures everything he writes. Except Marlowe himself, of course. It is somehow strange to realise that noir really is a Los Angeles genre. Perhaps because the films are black and white, I always think of it as being cold, dark and in the rain, not sunny and lined with palms. Though certainly my most vivid memory of visiting LA, over 20 years ago, is of being caught walking by the side of a highway in a thunderstorm at night, and a cop pulling over because it was so unusual to see a pedestrian.
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