Excerpt From The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler

I've been re-reading The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I had forgotten how much I love his writing. For instance:

The path took us along to the side of the greenhouse and the butler opened a door for me and stood aside. It opened into a sort of vestibule that was about as warm as a slow oven. He came in after me, shut the outer door, opened an inner door and we went through that. Then it was really hot. The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

"The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom." Larded, that word is evocative. I'm there in the greenhouse, the obscene sweetness of the flowers coating my tongue, my throat, making me want to gag. The scene is cast with a pall of sickness, of decay. I suppose it's a symbol for the decay that has infested the Sternwoods and come to fruition in Carmen.

In any case, I get inspired by great writing and wanted to share. :)

Keep writing!

In Defense of Genre

In A Genre Writer Accepts Himself, Will Lavender writes:

There is a war against popularity in many MFA programs in America, and in my 20s, I was on the front lines. I wrote literary fiction, the only work serious and relevant enough to be worth my time. I cut my blue jeans off at the knees and called everything ironic. I read John Banville's "The Sea" by an actual sea. I wrote the kinds of hard-bitten, muscular novelettes young men are supposed to become famous for writing.
....
In those first thrillers I read, I actually found a common bond to the experimental writers I'd once mimicked; in some of these books -- Abrahams' "Oblivion" is certainly one -- the writer looks to unmoor the very literary style he has invoked. Abrahams' novel is a detective novel, but it is one that slowly becomes unhinged; it is Raymond Chandler held up to a fogged, cracked glass.

If Lavender's books -- Obedience and Dominance -- are as interesting and well written as this article, then I think they would be well worth a read.