Thursday, July 23, 2009

Happy Birthday, Raymond Chandler!

The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor | Soundings by Joyce Sutphen: "It's the birthday of crime novelist Raymond Chandler, (books by this author) born in Chicago, Illinois (1888). He's known for his novels about the private detective Philip Marlow, such as The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1954). He's one of the originators of hardboiled detective fiction, and he's known more for the style and atmosphere of his novels than his plots.

He said, 'The things [my readers] remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death.'"

1 comment:

Doc Quatermass said...

Hate to tell you old buddy (you probably forgot this LOL) but Ray don't celebrate birthdays any longer. LOL