I’m mildly embarrassed to admit this, but I’d actually never read this before — or, actually, any Chandler (or Hammett, for that matter). I’m really sorry I waited this long. The Big Sleep is an early giant of this genre — and while Dashiell Hammett came earlier, it’s arguably the ur-text of the whole realm.

Reading it, you get a weird little cognitive dissonance here and there as you run across events or dialog that seems like cliches — but then you realize it wasn’t a cliche in 1933. It’s like watching Stagecoach and noting the “tired” Western tropes — they weren’t tried when John Ford used them. Phillip Marlowe is the hard-boiled private eye, refined from Hammett’s Sam Spade: he’s full of whisky and wisecracks, isn’t afraid of violence, and follows an uncompromising personal moral code. Spade and Marlowe’s children are legion — most notably Robert Parker‘s Spenser, but there are countless others ranging widely through genre (for example, Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, and Richard Kadrey’s Stark within the world of urban fantasy).

It’s not a long book, but it’s a rich one. You’ll find yourself reading some portions aloud to yourself, even slipping into a snappy patter as you do it, just for the sheer pleasure of saying the words:

“Tell me about yourself, Mr Marlowe. I suppose I have a right to ask?”

“Sure, but there’s very little to tell. I’m thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there’s any demand for it. There isn’t much in my trade. […] I’m unmarried because I don’t like policemen’s wives.”

or

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-lounge with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. […] The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. […]

She had a drink. She took a swallow from it and gave me a cool level stare over the rim of the glass.

“So you’re a private detective,” she said. “I didn’t know they really existed, except in books. Or else they were greasy little men snooping around hotels.”

There was nothing in that for me, so I let it drift with the current.

A bit later:

I grinned at her with my head on one side. She flushed. Her hot black eyes looked mad. “I don’t see what there is to be cagey about,” she snapped. “And I don’t like your manners.”

“I’m not crazy about yours,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind you showing me your legs. They’re swell legs, and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

You can hear those rhythms far and wide now, but in 1933, they were new.

Go. Read. Seriously, even if “detective fiction” isn’t really your thing. Chandler was way, way more than a genre writer. His works are well worth your time.

Dude. Gaiman. Done.

Seriously, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a brilliant and delightful meditation on childhood, a vein Gaiman seems fascinated with lately (cf. Coraline), but that’s fine by me. Ocean is a modern fable or fairy tale, with supernatural menaces and allies obviously perceived only by our young protagonist, but it’s in no way tired or old hat; it’s a great story, and worth your time.

I probably wouldn’t have bothered with any of Banks’ non-SF works, except, well, he died, and then my friend and longtime Heathen Lindsey X passed her copy of this on to me. I dove in.

The Wasp Factory a slim thing, and there’s not much I could say about it that hasn’t been said by deeper thinkers than I. It’s somewhat bleak, and certainly violent and sometimes disturbing — the more sadistic passages of Consider Phlebas have nothing on this. I felt Banks’ voice for sure, despite the age of the work (it’s his first novel), but I missed the wide-ranging inventiveness of his Culture books. I found myself somewhat surprised by the nearly universal accolades this book got; it’s a fine work, sure, but I didn’t feel the need to shout it from the rooftops. It’s still worth your time, though — as I noted, it’s short, so it won’t take much of it.

I’ve never bothered combining two posts before, but it seems fair with these books — the last two of a trilogy I started a year or two ago with Leviathan Wakes.

Corey — the pen name of collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — has created here a pretty solid little hard-SF space opera. The initial scene is set with the first book (seriously, start there if this appeals to you): in the not-too-far future, mankind has settled the moon, Mars, parts of the asteroid belt, and some of the gas giant moons. Our story involves a somewhat disgraced pilot (Jim Holden), tension between the Belters, Mars, and Earth, a hard-boiled-ish detective, a missing girl, mysterious alien tech, political intrigue, and a pace that’ll keep you up nights. There’s lots to like here.

The second book, Caliban’s War (which I finished over a month ago; I am so VERY behind on these posts), is perhaps a bit better, though it relies more on stock characters than the first, and the recurrence of a central theme (“missing girl”) is only mostly excused by the starkly different environment in which the pursuit happens. The mysterious alien tech is better understood, and bad things are happening because we meddled with it. (Who saw THAT coming, right?) The best part here is that a new main character is a irascible and bluntly charming Indian woman (Chrisjen Avasarala) who works political angles within Earth’s government with an aplomb that wouldn’t be out of place from Frank Underwood.

The final book, which I read partly because “vacation” and partly because of the momentum I felt after reading the second, is more of a let down. They move the pieces around, and we return to our ersatz Han Solo as a main character while adding a few new ones who are nowhere nearly as much fun as Avasarala. There’s a clumsy plot that calls back to the first book, and a sort of on-rails experience regarding the “big reveal” about the alien technology, where it came from, and what it’s ultimately for.

Still, none of these books take more than a day or two to read, so you don’t expect them to be plotted like Swiss watches. They were fun, and I’d probably give something from Corey another go, but I’m pretty sure I’d skip anything else in this particular universe; it’s clear they love it, but it’s equally clear they hold on to some elements book to book more than perhaps they should.

On this day in 1937, Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky. His suicide in 2005 remains a goddamn shame, because I’d love to hear what Hunter would write about PRISM or Trayvon Martin or Obama or Romney or Ted Cruz or even Tim Tebow. But we won’t get that.

Thompson wrote about politics, about sports, about counterculture, and most famously about drugs, but my favorite passage of his remains this, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about the failed promise of broad societal change in the sixties:

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.

Of course, it’s earlier in the book that we hear his most famous words (“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert…”). By the way, this is the picture from the first edition’s back cover:

(That’s Oscar Zeta Acosta on the right, the inspiration for Raoul’s friend and attorney Dr Gonzo. Acosta disappeared in Mexico in 1974; in 1977, Thompson described him as “One of God’s on prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and to rare to die.”)

Thompson’s culinary advice is also solid, as shown here in his description of a nutricious breakfast:

The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music…

All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

Modulo the Bolivian marching powder, we see no reason why this shouldn’t become a national standard.

Godspeed, Hunter. We miss you.

Neil Gaiman shared this link on Twitter yesterday; it covers interesting backstory about how a then mostly unknown Tori Amos came to write “Tear in Your Hand” after reading a borrowed copy of “Calliope” (Sandman #17) in 1990, and how complementary shout-outs ended up in subsequent issues of Sandman (most notably the fact that “Tear” is playing in the background a few years later, in issue, #41).

Rantz tells the story well. Go read it.