BINGE-READING RAYMOND CHANDLER.

Where did I start? The same place I started from originally: with Raymond Chandler’s books about the detective Philip Marlowe. When I decided to read them, I chose to read the books first and the short stories after. This was, accidentally, the best move I made.
   If you want to read Chandler’s detective stories, start with the books. This is for an obvious reason. He wrote the short stories and then welded a few stories into one book: The Big Sleep. And he would do that again for other novels. So read the books first. If you read the short stories and then the novels...you’ll think the books are awfully familiar in places.
   You owe it to yourself to read the books before the short pieces. I started there. Recently I decided to read Chandler again. All in a rush. So I started there, all over again. What is the body of work? Novels. Completed ones. Detective books. Big on mood, and atmosphere. Plotting takes a back seat. That’s Chandler’s style. What did I binge-read?
   The Big Sleep.
   Farewell, My Lovely.
   The High Window.
   The Lady in the Lake.
   The Little Sister.
   The Long Good-Bye.
   Playback.
   No Poodle Springs fragment completed by another hand after Chandler’s death. All Chandler, and all books. In order. But not quite in the order I’d like. I’ll return to that bit. But first, what is it you read, if you binge your way through Raymond Chandler’s books?
   There are no two-minute eggs in this collection. These stories are boiled hard, for at least ten minutes and maybe longer than that. There’s a lot of world-weary talk in these novels. Chandler pretty much hates everyone and everything. The books started up in the late 1930s, and continued through the 1940s and into the 1950s and Chandler’s death. It’s difficult to keep on writing after that. Brain-in-a-jar technology is always five years away.
   Hates everyone? In other words, expect racism. Chandler isn’t nice to black people. Mexicans, he generally doesn’t care for. He has a bit of a hate on for the Native American. It’s the mid-1940s, so hating on the Chinese sits next to detesting the Japanese. If there hadn’t been a Japanese sneak-attack, he’d have scorned the Japanese anyway.
   Chandler finds time to hate a lot of rich white people. And poor white people, too. He certainly hates himself. When television starts to appear in his fiction, he hates that as well. He finds time, through his character of Marlowe, to hate crooked cops and corrupt politicians. Hollywood-coded homosexuals fare no better. Chandler finds the time to hate the homophobic cops who hate the Hollywood-coded homosexuals. If he’d lived longer, he’d have written up a murder mystery about the death of Santa Claus.
   Women get their own separate category of hatred.
   If there’s a soft-boiled woman within Marlowe’s view, he’s sapped over the head before he can comment. Men murder men in Chandler’s books. And men murder women. Women do their share of murdering, too. Marlowe does kill. But he also spends a lot of time taking guns off people or having guns grabbed away from him.
   I bought these books one at a time, even though I could have picked up the whole collection at once. Then I bought the volumes of short stories and dived on in. Later, I’d return to a book to remind myself of the mood. The mood: desperate people commit all sorts of crimes. Marlowe trails along in the bloodied wake, finding bodies as he goes.
   One book stood out. I remember enjoying the story. Until I revisited the book, in isolation. For whatever reason, the novel fell flat for me. There seemed to be less in it than I remembered. That was The High Window. I guess I was in a mood myself, that time.
   Now, over the past week, I binged on Marlowe’s exploits. Reading each book hot on the heels of the last, I gained a deeper appreciation for the things Chandler did well. His stories are coffee-strong on mood and atmosphere. People will tell you Chandler wasn’t all that interested in plot. He was interested. Mood and atmosphere, the style, interested him a hell of a lot more.
   So what did I notice, this time around? Coffee and booze and cigarettes – oh, and pipes – don’t inhabit the landscape. They are the landscape. Cigars: not so much. In that time period you could buy information by waving a dollar around. Every story Marlowe hears from a suspect is screwy. And everyone Marlowe interviews is a suspect.
   If a bird turns up in a tale, chances are it’s a hummingbird. Radios blat, more than once. Chandler’s stories seethe with blatting radios. Climbing the corporate ladder inside a building involves sitting in a corner office. Occasionally, some of Chandler’s characters might even be sober as they get behind the wheel of a car.
   Los Angeles becomes a character, but not a character anyone could learn to like. Marlowe finds it difficult to cope with straight cops. The default setting is crooked. Big business could only grow big off the back of big crime. Chandler was an oil-man, and didn’t have to be told twice about that.
   Over the span of these books, Marlowe moves from the 1930s to the 1950s. He does so a little slowly, not quite ageing one year for every year that passes. That puts him in the same general area as a lot of fictional detectives. As the tales move into the 1950s, Marlowe and Chandler are both painfully aware that the world is leaving them both behind.
   It is jarring to read of television, helicopters, jet aircraft, and science fiction. Why would Marlowe bother mentioning them? He dances to his writer’s voice. Chandler decides. If we skip the details you could pin down to a specific time, what else covers the atmosphere in these books?
   Driving. Marlowe has to travel around to interview people, crumple under a sap, face bullets, crack wise at dirty cops, and so on. Driving gives Marlowe time to think. He doesn’t think very well of the world in general or California specifically. Driving time is time spent crossing California. To Marlowe, it’s such a chore.
   These, then, are the things you’ll notice if you binge-read Chandler’s books: closeted homosexuals and the cops who hate them a little too much for their own reputations, women as damaged goods, coffee, cigarettes, cigarette-holders, booze and lots of it only more so, corner offices, the smell of sandalwood, hummingbirds, the blatting of the radio, driving, being knocked out, violence, cracking wise to tough guys, tough guys cracking wise back, Hollywood as a cess-pit only more so…
   You’ve got the wrong attitude, reader. You’re not human tonight.

The Big Sleep. This is the novel brewed up using a formula. Take a few earlier stories, stitch them together, amplify on the text, square away most of the holes generated by a new overall plot, and ratchet up the mood. Place emphasis on the mood.
   Chandler gives us the detective caught up in two separate cases that somehow dovetail into the same case. There’s a hallucinatory feel to the book, starting in the unwholesome greenhouse where Marlowe is given his assignment. Do one thing. But don’t look into the other thing. Everyone assumes Marlowe is hired to look into the other thing.
   This brings a million complications. It’s a tough old world, boiled and uncompromising, and Marlowe is sent stumbling through it. Occasionally bruised and battered, he survives to go off into the sequel. And if you thought that was a plot spoiler, go fry a stale egg.
   What emerges from this first book? Marlowe wasn’t the character’s name, originally. He was going to be Mallory. Why? We dig deep into Arthurian legend here. Sir Thomas Malory had a huge hand in tales of King Arthur. And Chandler’s work is full of references to knights.
   This first book sees Marlowe on his way to that greenhouse. Before he reaches it, though, he catches sight of artwork at the entrance to the mansion. Or castle. A knight, but not one in shining armour, is untying a naked damsel in distress. We get plenty of knight references after this.
   Marlowe enjoys chess puzzles. And the knight is that peculiar piece in chess. It makes a sideways move to go forward. And Marlowe as a detective has to make a load of side-moves to gain any forward progress. It’s no surprise that Marlowe could have been Mallory, after Malory. He’s Marlowe, after the playwright Kit Marlowe. An outright Shakespearean name-reference would’ve been too close to the bone when dealing with tragedy. Chandler was no slouch in throwing Shakespearean references at the readers.
   Having revisited Chandler’s first book, what did I find? The jump from one case to another works. Here begins the recurring theme. Was a suicide a murder? Maybe a murder was actually suicide. The big question about the death of the chauffeur – who killed him – goes away if Chandler/Marlowe writes it off as suicide.
   It’s a great beginning to a detective series. And I still rate it highly.

Farewell, My Lovely. Arthurian references abound. Ultimately, Marlowe is on a quest for a woman named Grayle. And that’s no coincidence. A grail-quest is just the right sort of mission for a slightly tarnished knight like Marlowe. Again we have two cases and nothing to connect them. The connective tissue is there, though, and Chandler is far more adept at welding older stories together here.
   It’s one thing to write a classic introductory mission for a detective. But it’s really something else to create a classic follow-up. The atmosphere here is built up through unconnected stories merging strangely in the night. Of all the characters Chandler gives us, he gives us Marlowe. But he remembers to throw a Shakespearean supporting cast his way, too.
   Moose Malloy, a force of nature and a storm at that, flits through the story with all the grace of a vampire bat – tied to the back of a raging bull in a China shop. Everything is larger than life in Chandler’s fiction, and Moose Malloy is the poster-child for that theme. It’s the switch to pursuit of jade in the second case, tied to the first case, that still fascinates on returning to this book.

The High Window. I liked this, read it again and it left me cold…but reading them rapidly one after another creates more of an atmosphere inside these books. This time around, I appreciated far much more was going on and it didn’t leave me flat at all. It jumped up off the floor and took its rightful place back there in the series.
   You’ll notice I’m trying to limit myself to the details of the plot. I’ll throw this at you, instead. Another Arthurian reference. Marlowe is almost Sir Galahad. But worn-out. World-weary. Shop-soiled. Given his womanising, he’s more like Lancelot after accidentally-on-purpose sleeping with the Queen while the King is away. More chess pieces, of course. Yes, I returned to liking this one. Maybe it is the overall package, reading book after book, relentlessly, that helped.

The Lady in the Lake. There’s little that’s more Arthurian than a reference to a lady in a lake. Here, we are in the mid-1940s and America is at war. This is the home front that American troops are defending, and what a crime-ridden setting it is. Or is there a crime? The lady found in the lake might have died there accidentally or suicidally. Sure, there’s a murder suspect. But there’s always a murder suspect. The lakeside setting takes Marlowe out of his usual stomping-ground, but he goes back and forth.
   We have series continuity, with Chandler building up the corrupt Bay City. Characters from one book turn up in another. Marlowe sees a few familiar faces across the seven-novel series. At this point, we’ve reached that peculiar blip in the road.
   Chandler worked in Hollywoodland, and detested it. He turned in a script called Playback. Chandler was paid for this, but the movie was never made. Nice work if you can get it. Later, at the end of his career, Chandler took elements of the screenplay and worked his way up to a book of the same title.
   But. The best place for Playback, in the series, is after The Lady in the Lake and before The Little Sister. If Chandler had worked up the energy, he could’ve rewritten Playback to follow in the trail of continuity after The Lady in the Lake. I still believe that’s where it should have gone, in the reading order. Alas, it was not to be. Playback became something else, entirely.

The Little Sister. Chandler throws Shakespeare at us early in this one, with a reference to Lady Macbeth. The devastating level of world-weariness in this book is something to marvel at. I’m talking about chapter thirteen. Chandler, through Marlowe, has a go at California, Los Angeles, and Hollywood and he takes no prisoners. Expect blatting from the radio.
   Chapter thirteen is a driving scene, giving Marlowe a platform on which to rage against California. It’s one of the standout pieces of writing in this novel. Chandler gives us more bile in a later driving scene when he’s heading to a confrontation. He’s not done.
   Of the plot I can say nothing. If you had a hard time working out who killed the chauffeur way at the start of these books, you’ll be scratching your head over the murder confessions in this one. When people turn up to cover for someone else, bending Marlowe’s ear with an agenda, where does the truth lie but dead in the dust…
   Much of the book turns on the murder of Moe Stein. He deserved murdering, of course. I’ll draw your attention to a doctor: Vincent Lagardie. We’ll return to that point in The Long Good-Bye. Anyway, this entry in the series stays with you. It’s later Chandler, and he’s still on top form.

The Long Good-Bye. Everything builds to this. It’s the finest finish to a detective series that I can think of. Yes, it is followed by Playback. But the series ends here. You know it. I know it. This is a much longer book, and Chandler uses the space to let characters breathe a little: Marlowe, in particular.
   There’s a piece of plotting around finding a crooked doctor. The letter V features big-time. No, Marlowe isn’t hunting for Vincent Lagardie. But isn’t it strange that, across two books, there are four doctors associated with the letter V, and all of them are crooks…
   Marlowe finds the crooked doctor almost immediately. But he can’t be sure. So he follows up on the other leads. Dead-ends, barely worth the shoe-leather. But I liked the depiction of chasing after loose ends and tying them off before returning to the better prospect and hunting the true culprit down.
   In a shorter novel, Chandler would have limited himself to one suspect. To save space in the book, if nothing else. But this novel opens up, takes its time, and builds to that ending. This is as late as Chandler gets. The series ends here. Except that he dusts off a screenplay from the 1940s and has one more go.

Playback. This is a much shorter book. Lean. Chandler gets on with it. And I like it. There are great moments in here. It’s no way to end a series, not after The Long Good-Bye. But here we are. More tough guys making with tough guy acts. I remember one character vividly, and that’s an old man in the hotel, the man who could lip-read. Call it a hunch. I felt sure Raymond Chandler was writing himself into the story. No, I’m not the first to think that, and I won’t be the last.
   This is the end, and it is okay. It would be much better to shunt this story back before The Little Sister and to edit accordingly. That’s where this one truly belongs. After this, there was an attempt to write again. Chandler produced a fragment completed by Robert B. Parker. That’s called Poodle Springs. But we’re not talking about that here.
   What did I think of the series? It worked. In its time, it was steeped in the 1930s and 1940s. Here and now. Fresh. If you go wading through the fiction and find it cliché-ridden, remember those clichés had to start somewhere. Marlowe, for better or worse, became a template for the tough private detective.
   Chandler’s writing endures. Readers waltzing unawares into the fiction will discover that hard-boiled gritty writing isn’t terribly nice to women. It doesn’t show men in a great light, either. Everyone and everything is tough. The toughest character in the books? Los Angeles. Not even an earthquake could erase the stain of it.

 

COLONEL SUN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I stared at a story from yesteryear. COLONEL SUN: putting James Bond through his paces after his battle against a man who owned a golden gun. But I also looked at my own short story in that area. I can only call it James Bond Tourism. That’s as kind as I’ll be to my past self. Throw Bond into a familiar setting, drop in references to past misadventures, and wrap it up in a pastry of heat and violence.
   Having had a crack at that sort of nonsense myself, I’m in a position to say that Ian Fleming’s style is easy to observe yet hard to pin down on the page when typing in the manner of that far-off country of the past. The precise detail involving food, drink, places, and vehicles. That ability of Fleming’s to want to write fiction by dressing it in real clothes…is taxing.
   If you desire to invent guns, cars, and meals, why, turn to science fiction and be done with it. Have your hero drive a 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. He should be a detective named Marlowe, in a space zoot suit, with a goldfish bowl for a helmet. Google is his friend. Or digital assistant. Something along those lines.
   Fleming and Chandler wrote about worlds containing real guns. Yes, movies featuring James Bond are full of product placement. This is true of Fleming’s books. He packs the stories with guns, cars, food, and drink. All real. Why invent, when the genuine article adds a layer of reality to an otherwise fanciful tale? Bed the fiction in a garden of real items, and make your outlandish saga somehow more reasonable.
   Writing like Fleming is, indeed, taxing. And that’s for reasons of product placement, alone. James Bond’s taste at breakfast is not Bond’s. Strictly speaking, it isn’t exactly Ian Fleming’s. No. The devil in the detail at breakfast comes from Fleming’s friend William Plomer.
   This set me wondering. Fleming surrounded himself with people who were contacts when it came to story details. Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his book about Commander James Bond? Let’s have a bit of clarity. Novel.
   Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his James Bond novel? For Amis had already tackled Bond to the ground in an ungentlemanly game of rugby elsewhere. Amis drew on Ian Fleming’s books and also Fleming’s knowledge when it came to compiling a dossier on James Bond.
   Not a novel. A book. And he met Fleming, who was near the end of his life, just to cover details in the dossier. Fleming pointed out a few slips. The Bond author was used to those, having taken both barrels from the acid wit of Noël Coward.
…what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 6 a.m. in dear old England. This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 4 p.m. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue.
   Fleming had the same brand of acid flowing through his veins, when it came to Noël Coward.
   It’s interesting. When you sweat with embarrassment the sweat runs down your face and drops off your first chin on to your second.
   Amis analysed Bond from the stance of a fannish reader who knew the dossier assignment called for a bit more work than just liking the fiction and regurgitating facts. His own level of criticism may have had Amis shaking in his socks moments before meeting Fleming. But the Bond author didn’t gut the new boy.
   And Amis was the new boy. Soon enough, he, too, would be a Bond author. When Fleming died, leaving The Man with the Golden Gun short of the revision and polish required to bring it up to ramming speed, Amis was offered a crack at it.
   History differs as to what happened next. Amis made recommendations, but they weren’t carried out. Alternatively, Amis made changes uncredited. He rewrote the book. Or he wrote the book. What do we know about any of this wilderness of mirrors?
   Fleming wrote the book. He complained about it to his editor, William Plomer. There were plans to finish the job. But Fleming’s time was marked, and his heart gave out. Amis was asked to look at the manuscript. Money changed hands. He was hired on as a consultant.
   Yes, he made recommendations. Fleming’s fingerprints are all over an actual manuscript. Amis provided a page of notes. You only review twice, Mr Amis. Once when you read the manuscript in private, and once when you publish a bitchy review that questions why some of your own ideas weren’t taken up throughout the story.
   For that is what Amis does in his published review. He asks why Fleming didn’t exploit this point or that part of the plot. Then he offers his own alternative motive for the absurdity of the assassin Scaramanga taking James Bond on as a partner in crime. Scaramanga fancied him something rotten.
   Not according to William Plomer, who’d been closely involved with the book. At the end of his life, Fleming struggled to complete the story. Complete it he did. But not to the level of detail Fleming demanded of himself.
   Amis decried the thinness of the book’s plot. We’ll return to that when I stick a knife in the back of Colonel Sun. And so, to Colonel Sun. It’s easy to mock by calling the book…
   The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim Bond.
   Take a (Bond) Girl Like You.
   The Old (Foreign) Devils.
   Amis has a bit of a fixation with setting Bond up as a hero in the Byronic fashion. Whatever the fuck that is. It’s just Amis being Amis. Or Markham, which was his cover for the Bond assignment. A cover Amis immediately blew.
   Why is Kingsley Amis, of all people, writing a special introduction to this guy Markham’s book? Although Kingsley’s name is shorter on the cover, his name appears in larger type. What’s that about? Some kind of fix was in.
   Ann Fleming, Ian’s widow and keeper of the sacred flame, hated Bond. But she managed to love Ian Fleming, no easy task, and hated Kingsley Amis even more than she detested her husband’s violent creation.
   She didn’t want this slipshod fair-weather commie writing the further adventures of a character she couldn’t stand. Never one to let her snobbishness get in the way of her snobbishness, Ann joined a long list of people who had nothing good to say of Kingsley Amis.
   How did Amis do, in the Bond stakes? Well enough that his work filtered down into the movies. The World is Not Enough borrows the central point of Colonel Sun: M is kidnapped.
   Die Another Day doesn’t have Colonel Sun in it, but there’s a Colonel Tan-Sun Moon. Just far enough from the character Amis gave us to avoid having to pay out cash for the use. However, the movie is a camouflaged version of Moonraker and has little to do with Amis, beyond half-pinching a character name.
   Spectre, though, puts Amis deep in the closing credits for dialogue that appears in Colonel Sun. This is a torture scene. Congratulations. Amis made it into the worst Bond movie. Spectre is, in my view, fucking lamentable. That’s a highly technical term. Film has its moments, but moments don’t lead to a satisfying cinema-going experience.
   They’d done a deal. Spectre was back on the menu, after the legal dust settled – for the last time. Kevin McClory’s long-running dispute over ownership of various story elements died with him. After that, it was much easier to settle on a deal.
   Okay. Resurrect Spectre. And the boss, Blofeld. But make it meaningful. How? Oh, show flashbacks to other Bond characters in the opening credits. That’s where the welding starts. Taking the Daniel Craig movies and fusing them into one long integrated storyline that shows…Spectre was behind everything, all along.
   No. It does not work. Thanks for asking. The movie is the story of two boys who know each other. One grows up to be James Bond. And the other…what, creates Spectre just to get back at Bond? Er…
   Where the fuck was I? Amis successfully wrote and delivered his one Bond novel. The opening is good. There are vivid scenes. His one failing is the plot, which is practically non-existent. Think it over for two seconds, and it falls apart. Why is the villain doing this? For all his talk of trying something new, by going into a Greek setting, Amis rehashes Doctor No as a far less interesting Colonel Sun.
   A fleet of books followed, guided by other hands. Had Amis lived to see his credit in Spectre, well, first, he’d have been a hell of a fucking age. Second, he’d have derided much of the movie. You can see his ears perking up at the dialogue in the torture sequence. Numbers flash over his eyes as he calculates whether any payment for usage felt worthwhile.
   Amis wrote Bond for the money. Fleming wrote Bond to create excitement as he typed page to page, staving off boredom. Ian Fleming, thrilled at the thought of creating a scene in a story. That stays with me, long after Amis typing for cash saw his Colonel disappear at the first sunset.

 

DORI SEDA - GAP-TOOTHED ARTIST: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Cartoonist, short of ideas, has to fill the blank page before the sands of time run out. Draws herself drawing herself, filling one panel. The story is…the cartoonist is short of ideas, and has to fill the blank page before the sands of time run out.
   Cartoonist takes a break to grab food. That’s good for at least another two panels. A skilled operator can parlay this edible move up into double that with a waffly retread of literally going back to the drawing board.
   Next panel. Cartoonist turns to audience and explains where her ideas come from. There’s a mention of a deadline. (Cue cartoonist now with back to the audience, staring out at a New York sunset. Cartoonist lives in a flat in Shireshire, England, but gets another five panels out of the imaginary New York transition anyway.)

*

And I’ve managed four paragraphs and a tenth of the blog post from…waffling about a cartoonist doing the old dog-ate-my-artwork sketch. This is a good ploy if you are six years old and must write a one-page story with really really big looping handwriting helping you out on the padding side of things.
   Note to the believers: this doesn’t actually work if you are six years old. I stared in disbelief at the writing of those believers, looping their letters like stricken biplanes trailing smoke and flames in the First World War. You’ve flown your Sopwith Pencil over half of France just to write three words.
   I find myself a third of the way into the month, after vowing to blog by the second of November at the latest, and still no blog post. Things get in your way. You stumble into icebergs and trip over autumn leaves. That polar bear comes calling for coffee. There’s tidying. But there’s always tidying.
   If things look too tidy, there’s something wrong. I’m tempted to knock over a stack of things, just to avoid the tidiness of too much tidiness. But that’s folly, and the world knows this. I hit on the idea of blogging about something that suddenly takes unfeasible amounts of research.
   Checks notes.
   That stalled blog is half a blog. Out of semi-nowhere, yesterday, I conjured half a blog from airy nothingness and fairy gossamer. And I just had to fucking stop. There was too much to say, and a pile to research, just for a blog with nothing much to say.
   I bought a book. It was damaged by smoke. This led to many tangents and much fact-checking. I concluded I couldn’t complete the blog within the span of a single day – I had other commitments.
   And so. Did you ever hear about the cartoonist, short of ideas…
   I could find a specific example. But that means crawling through the stacks of books and firing up a scanner. I can at least go and look, just to prove to myself that the book is in the same place.
   It shouldn’t be possible to lose track of a book in here, but I was once trapped in my library. This makes me sound like Marcus Brody, who managed to get lost in his own museum.
   Checks bookshelves.
   Okay, clambers over things and reaches the exact shelf to check bookshelves. I call that a win.
   Passed Marcus Brody on the way back.
   Well, that padded another line. Also, I didn’t fire up the scanner. I used the camera instead. And that padded another another line.
   We have a winner: Dori Stories, which gives us the artist on the front cover drawing art as a means of padding out the story. Mission accomplished. I was writing about a smoke-bedecked book of selected letters: Raymond Chandler, the culprit. This took too long.

But here I am, one day later, taking a detour into the work of Dori Seda. Also deceased as I type, along with Raymond Chandler, but who knows…maybe Dori just died “retired from public life” to live out the rest of her vampire existence in private.
   Dori had a thing for vampires in her comic strips. And she was very close to her dog.
   Checks notes.
   I’ve mentioned Raymond Chandler in eight blog posts, including this one. But this is a first for Dori Seda. I should have mentioned her sooner. She was an artist of the 80s who couldn’t leave the 80s. Dori was dead and gone by the time I flitted through her loose vampire-stomping turf in the Mission District of San Francisco.
   Told you I made up that New York sunset.
   In reality, sticking with the vampirism, Dori was more likely to witness a San Francisco moonrise. She was an artist who was an artist before she became an artist. Her interest in ceramics, coupled with smoking, and lung problems aggravated by her ceramic work, took her away far too soon.
   I can see her carving a career out of ceramics, constructing those seashell-like fancies, without ever turning to her blank drawing board. But comics lured her with the siren call. She was in the right place at the right time to be accepted for the style of panel stories she told.
   And I’ve reached that point, the point at which my Raymond Chandler blog stalled. Words dissolved in research at this point yesterday. Write a blog within a day if it requires great research. But write a blog in a single sitting if you can.
   This blog post, casually referencing Dori Seda, doesn’t require much toil by way of study. (Something of which Dori would doubtless approve.)
   After all, she made it easy for me to make a reference by putting her artistic struggle on the cover of the book I sought. She didn’t do that. People who cared about her work did that on her behalf, and…
   Okay, I interrupted myself by picking the book up and checking the price. Yours for $19.95 on the edition that found its way into the stacks. What does that cost now?

 

Jesus Christ, Fenton!
   Two grand for this book. And £2.80 delivery. A steal. No. Wait. Fuck that. This is a deal-breaker. Should be free delivery. Don’t buy it, folks. It’s a trap.
   Flitting through the book, I come to a photo-story about Dori starring as Sylvia Silicosis. Fucking hell, that’s too close to the fucking bone. But that’s her, all right, down to the quick of the nail. In the abandoned Raymond Chandler piece, I made the point that biography only gives you a sketch of a person.
   “Harsh but obvious fact: no biography truly covers a life.”
   And this is true of the compilation on my bookshelves. We have immediate visual access to Dori and her cat-bedecked ceramic pieces. Many of her drawings are inhabited by vampires people with pronounced incisors. And so it goes.
   She’d have loved and hated the digital art world in unequal measure. I guess she’d have sat through the Ghost World movie or the Crumb documentary thinking, there’s Zwigoff making movies. Who did he fuck to get the movie dollars for that?
   With Zwigoff directing the documentary on Crumb, there’s a feeling that the two are just having a reunion of Crumb’s band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders...in which Zwigoff played on cello and borrowed time. Terry Zwigoff is the kind of character who couldn’t get the money together to make a Dori Seda movie that wouldn’t do justice to Dori Seda anyway.
   It is only through the power of the interwebs, and possibly Castle Grayskull, that I found my way to the sound of R. Crumb’s voice. He’s been preserved in digital aspic, on a BBC radio slot known as Sweet Shellac, that you can find on The YouTubes.
   On a semi-regular basis, Crumb would announce Hello, folks, tell you who he was, and then dip into the nostalgia of Jug Bands. Not the sort of jugs Crumb’s art is known for. At least the radio slots are listenable. Zwigoff’s documentary on the Crumb family is eerily watchable for an unwatchable document.
   But where do we go for the merest glimpse of Dori Seda? Not hard to track down, now. She drew the poster for Gap-Toothed Women, a short documentary on that subject by Les Blank, Maureen Gosling, Chris Simon, and Susan Kell.
   Dori died about a year after appearing in the documentary, and, being Dori, she pretty much had to fight to be included as a gap-toothed woman in a documentary about gap-toothed women.
   We can access the snippet featuring her poster art on vimeo. Dori was excluded from the final documentary, but final is a relative term to artists. She dropped in, explained her worth as a comic book scribe, and would’ve sashayed out with her dog by her side if they’d had time to film nonsense of that stripe. Well. Damn.
   She was very close to that dog, though. We know this from the immortality granted to Tona in the comic strips. Maybe there was an earlier dog named Day. Now Dori haunts my bookshelves, asking if vimeo is a dirty word...and, if not…why not?

UNFINISHED UNFINISHED BUSINESS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

John le Carré appears to have left the Circus with unfinished business: one more novel. But he left that truly unfinished, meeting the ultimate deadline all writers face, and his son put a final coat of paint to the piece on his dad’s behalf.
   I blogged about this in the Central Registry. Short version…

 

*

 

Are you prepared to track down the comic book adaptation of the movie of the opera of the pizza of the book?
   Will you discover, many years later, that a revised version of the sacred text was uncovered at an archaeological dig deep in the forests of Pern? Are you keen on the Michelin Restaurant Guide to the Inns and Taverns of Mordor…
   What is the output? It is whatever you find and in that inexact order. I’ve read ’em all, and then I’ve gone on to read some more.

 

*

 

In the case of le Carré, my order of reading was all over the place. I started with his Karla Trilogy, conveniently collected in an inconvenient tome – difficult to read while trying to perch coffee in mid-air.
   It’s a hard-won skill.
   So the core Smiley story, I read in order. Later I found books leading up to that trilogy and away from it. But the one-volume trilogy really is its own creature. The earlier stuff is the earlier stuff.
   Imagine skipping The Hobbit and reading Tolkien’s main body of work. You get by. Along those lines. Later, it’s up to you to decide if you want to visit the start…so you can genuinely go there and back again.
   I worked my way through le Carré, vaulting over his out-of-place novel: The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. Still can’t bring myself to attempt that nonsense again. The author’s books are not all Smiley books, and you can just about skate around the chronological reading order with a degree of dexterity and little chance of slipping.
   Now, on belatedly learning of its existence, I have another tome to add to the le Carré archive. It is his last novel, and I will read it last. (The book I skipped STAYS skipped.) Read the last one last? You’d think this is the way of things, but often it feels like a luxury. What is the last book, after all?
   If an author travels to an earlier point in a series, writes a prequel, then dies…that’s the last book written, but the first in the series. Tricky. Then there’s the series that runs after death, written by other hands steering a shaky tiller as the franchise sails choppy seas. Awkward.
   Yes, there’s the variation on that course of action: other hands step in mid-way through a sentence after the author’s death. Tying off loose ends at best. Necrophilia at worst. And there’s the reader variation…
   The reader dies before the book series tolls its last bell. Looking in your direction, George R.R. Martin. How many readers fell by the wayside, toppled by the Reaper’s scythe, as they tried to play the Game of Tomes?
   This also reminds me of authors who are bombarded by needy reviewers using the old terminal illness ploy. Could you send me your latest epic in manuscript form? Leukaemia is a bitch. Two entirely unconnected statements leaning against one another. When the author sees through the ploy, it’s a case of over that author’s dead body.
   You think this doesn’t happen? That’s akin to believing famous literary competitions don’t flout their own submission rules. Aw, bless your dear heart. The competition is now open and receiving published books…so why are publishers throwing raw manuscripts at the judges?
   Tsk.
   Unfinished business. Harsh to say this, but, on occasion, it’s better if a writer dies before starting the next book in the series. That’s a solemn tombstone of a thought. I won’t trouble you with examples. You’ll find plenty out there.
   What of unfinished books, from the other direction? I’ve been down this wayward path before, but not often. If I start reading a book, I finish reading that book. With few exceptions. Rarely, I’ve started a book I knew I just couldn’t finish. Still a mere handful of stories, after all those hours searching the stacks.
   Yes, sometimes it is a dusty piece of toil to turn a page. But turn a page I must. So much for books that I score off a list. The authors are scored off, too, lest I repeat the dusty toil anew. Let us draw a veil upon those boring reading experiences. “Experiences.”
   Time passes and, eventually, the final volume in a series arrives. If it is the final volume. We can say that with certainty in the case of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. After a gap of unknown proportions, I finally settled on the last tome in the tale – The Tempest. What surprises are left, there?
   It has 3D glasses! Fucketty-fuck! Are you shitting me?! And not the modern kind, either. The red and green variety of optical delusion is on full display here. Didn’t see that coming. Alan Moore, credited as himself and not as THE CREATOR, most likely for reasons of tax, would be very familiar with gimmick items released alongside comic books.
   He wrote for 2000AD, which started life with a Space Spinner attached to the front cover. I imagine a young Alan in short trousers and long grey beard, regaling all in the streets with the news of an astronautical accompaniment to a weekly periodical of scientific-fictionalised purpose and intent.

 

*

 

It is an ancient author-er,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”

 “With my cross-bow I shot the albatross. In 3D. Special Anaglyph visual aid free with each issue. Made with high-grade recyclable cardboard. And degenerate plastic. Which doesn’t actually degenerate. Dolphin-Friendly in non-liquid areas.”

 

*

 

Anna Glyph is the type of superhero character you’ll find in an Alan Moore story, along with Polly Amory, Sid E. Reáltime, and Judge Dread. Wait. I think that last one’s been done. I expect a sense of finality in the final volume of a story…not 3D glasses. Surprising.
   And that leads to the point about the final story being a fitting end to whatever series you are reading. We have the interwebs now, and the information super-country-lane. In Tolkien’s day, there was none of that.
   Just two fans, having that conversation. What happens if he dies before he finishes the saga? There was no internet. It was possible that fans didn’t know the entire story was readied in vast chunks at the printer, putting Tolkien ahead of George R.R. Martin in the Game of Tomes.
   Even if Tolkien published part one without finishing part three, popping his clogs, kicking the bucket, and letting a wizardy pipe fall from his hands, his son Christopher would have stepped in to wrest the type and type the rest upon his death. Ah, but this takes us on a short trip to another point. Is a member of the family the best choice for continuation of the legacy?
   You’ll have to try that stew on your own. If you don’t like the recipe, add salt. Online critics do, with ease.
   Works published after an author’s demise take on an atmosphere they wouldn’t otherwise – if you’ve heard the news, that is. The existence of the very last le Carré tome never crossed my mind. I noticed it by chance.
   So, yes, I ask myself if this final book, written in a body’s declining days, will show the faltering storytelling of a declining mind…or maybe le Carré was pin-sharp to the end, and merely ran out of hours. How much mood is altered, tone shifted, atmosphere distorted, knowing another’s hand stepped in to tie the last shoelace and close the door on the way to the printer?
   Adam Hall dictated Quiller’s last literary moments from his deathbed. Yes, to his son. Does it get more dramatic than that? Hard to say. Adam Hall knew it would be the last book. Time was against him – a feature he employed to keep his fictional spy on the edge.
   For my money, Hall gave us the perfect sentiment on which to end a series. Raymond Chandler did that, too. Except, once he was finished with The Long Good-bye, he resurrected a screenplay from the 1940s and furnished one last-gasp of an effort: Playback. The detective Marlowe resurfaced out of a cinematic past just before his creator died.
   Death isn’t the only thing that leads to unfinished business. You lose track of authors. They disappear for a long while, and you become busy with other things. Then a coincidence carries you back in that particular direction as you march between the digital shopping stacks.
   Oh. There’s that series. How did that go? (Wanders casually down the leaf-strewn information super-country-lane.) Damn. Looks as though I have unfinished business with that series, those characters, and the words of yon author.
   That’s the point. There’s always something new to look at. Even if the new thing bypassed you when it was new…and now sits in a heap of autumn leaves. Night draws in like a cloak with the wind at your back. Catching up on unfinished unfinished business, reading, gives you something to do when the hint of a chill rises and the weather turns with the promise of changing seasons in the sparkling air.

BOOK OF THE MOVIE OF THE BREAKFAST CEREAL: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Chasing down an author’s output, I realised I hadn’t read all of Raymond Chandler’s short stories. There’s a single volume out there that does the deed for you, if that’s what you are after.
   Chandler is a writer I overdosed on. An experiment. I made a solid decision in buying and reading his novels: part of a plan to write rocket ship stories. Battery-powered fairy tales.
   To write in a particular area, first exhaust that particular area.
   Once you’ve exhausted that particular area by reading the absolute shit out of it, read outwith the area you wish to write in. In other words, sitting there thinking that I’d write science fiction…I decided I really needed to read more crime stories.
   And read them I did. I overdosed on Chandler and had to wave goodbye to his writing once I’d tackled the short stories. If you want to read his work, read the novels first. For fuck’s sake, read the novels first. Luckily, I did.
   What would I learn from my experiment? Doesn’t matter what I thought I’d pick up. That’s not the same as what I did learn from reading those works. I learned that the story told by a narrator who is also the main character…that type of writing leaves a lot of space for ambiguity in crime stories.
   You can have a 100% reliable first person narrator…but, even so, that person is almost always quite rightly lagging behind the action. Things happened, giving the character something to trail behind – something to investigate.
   In Chandler’s stories, the reader sees what Marlowe sees. Then the reader is given a lot of information on what Marlowe thinks about what was seen. What about the stuff Marlowe never sees?
   This direct approach falls apart unless the author takes action. Solution? Chandler gives us two fixes. When he was stuck, he simply had a man walk through a door with a gun. But he had another solution…
   Marlowe is knocked unconscious. Hey, it works. It’s an easy fix that allows the detective to wake up and wonder who did what, where, when, and how. (Throwing an IF or two into that cake-mix.) Marlowe lags behind the action, and is sapped.
   Admittedly, Marlowe is then allowed to make leaps of logic ahead of the action, based on having lagged behind it while unconscious. He wakes up and takes the reader along with him, over his shoulder, playing hunches, and we just have to put up with that.
   What Marlowe doesn’t see…is for Marlowe to mull over when he regains consciousness. Chandler provides several avenues of detective escapism for the readers to consider. Mostly, though…
   You see what Marlowe sees.
   This is taken to the cinematic extreme in Lady in the Lake, the movie adaptation of The Lady in the Lake. Chandler’s format is repeated for the movies. Marlowe, played (briefly) by Robert Montgomery, talks to the audience here and there.
   Say, Marlowe does that all the time in the books.
   More to the point, the movie is mostly a view from the camera itself. You see Marlowe’s reflection in a mirror when the camera stares at the mirror. That kind of thing. I guess it would be the world’s earliest known example of a first-person shooter…
   Except that Marlowe doesn’t shoot anyone. He certainly slugs a guy. A first-person action adventure, then. This view from the camera casts Paul Vogel, the director of cinematography, as the real star.
   Robert Montgomery’s screen-time is negligible. That’s okay. He earned his money directing the movie. We have to let him off on that score. There’s a neat little Easter Egg in the opening credits, but to say more is to say too much. (Brush up on your French and keep your eyes peeled.)
   Well, by this time I was up to my eyebrows in cinematic adaptations of Chandler’s work. Throw in some television material, too. Powers Boothe plays a prototype Marlowe taken from the short stories in a TV show that reeks of the mean streets this detective must walk down.
   Watching the movies and a bit of TV, I went on the detective trail – chasing after the Chandler stories I hadn’t read. This involved a lot of cross-referencing. I narrowed the field down to four tales.
   Then I misremembered that I had comic book adaptations of Chandler’s output, so one of the “unread” stories was there in print with pictures to help explain the plotting to me. I know that Chandler didn’t write detective material exclusively. So the remaining stories are going to be off-kilter. But still Chandler.
   Does that mean I’ve hunted down an author’s output? I’m checking the planet for another story that’s in a collection of his writings. We’ll see if there’s a tale in that direction. As for the movies, I still haven’t seen a Michael Shayne film called Time to Kill. This is a renamed version of Chandler’s book, The High Window – in turn filmed under yet another title as The Brasher Doubloon.
   I’ve not seen The Brasher Doubloon either, though I have seen one of the coins up close and personal. Is it worth millions? According to those who put that worth on it, yes.
   Michael Shayne, detective, has a few Chandler connections. The character was played on radio by an actor named Chandler. At the movies, Lloyd Nolan was the star – and he’d appear as a Bay City cop in Murder, My Sweet – the movie adaptation of Farewell, my Lovely.
   I’ll state for the record that I couldn’t make it past fifteen minutes of Elliott Gould playing a schmuck – portraying the dick in private dick. For me, that experience was a rather short goodbye.
   No, I don’t care that Leigh Brackett worked on the script. How much of her work was filtered out by the director and the star is hard to say. Gould mumbled his way through. No good to me. Who cares? Nobody cares.
   Gould famously married a woman named Bogart. Twice. Her dad was a moviemaker himself – and directed a film called Marlowe. Why can’t these people just film the book titles?
   The Falcon Takes Over = Farewell, my Lovely. George Sanders. (1942.)
   Time to Kill = The High Window. Lloyd Nolan. (1942.)
   Murder, My Sweet = Farewell, my Lovely. At least they kept the comma when they changed the title at short notice. Dick Powell. (1944.)
   The Big Sleep. A Hollywood aberration, seeing as they kept the title. Luckily, they kept a fair amount of the story. Leigh Brackett worked on this script. We’ll return to her. Humphrey Bogart. (1946.)
   Lady in the Lake = The Lady in the Lake. Robert Montgomery “starred” and directed. (1947.)
   The Brasher Doubloon = The High Window. George Montgomery. (1947.)
   Marlowe = The Little Sister. James Garner. (1969.)
   The Long Goodbye. Here, they kept the title and threw out everything else. Big Arnie holds up the scenery in this one. Elliott Gould plays a character named Marlowe. It could be set on the back end of the moon in the year dot for all I care. And I don’t care. Who cares? Nobody cares. Leigh Brackett was in on the scripting here, but who knows how much of her work was slashed. Elliott Gould. (1973.)
   Farewell, My Lovely. First of the Mitchum movies, set in period. Blink and you miss Sly Stallone. Robert Mitchum. (1975.)
   The Big Sleep. Second of the Mitchum movies, filmed and set in the 1970s – you can see a vehicle tax disc with a ’77 expiration on it, confirming the exact period. Also, this movie is transplanted to England – obvious from the opening shots of un-American roads. Robert Mitchum. (1978.)
   Chandler was an anglophile. That’s an American who is allowed to pour scorn on the English after having actually met them. Hell, he even held a British passport through the bulk of his crime-writing life.
   The original unfilmable porn plot of The Big Sleep finally rears its head in 1970s London, and, strangely, it works. Chandler liked English mansions so much that he didn’t bat an eyelid when it came to transporting Imperial details into his fiction.
   Had Chandler lived to experience London in the 1970s, he’d have been aghast at the moral decline. Then he’d have picked up a shaky pen to gleefully denote the Fall of Rome and wax nostalgic about his time as an Edwardian poet. No, really.
   I never said he was a good Edwardian poet.
   My point. Updating Chandler to the 1970s or later is a sin, even if Mitchum acquits himself well in the role as he mouths off authentic Chandler dialogue. And transplanting Marlowe to England is a crime – it works, but only just. The movie features two cases, and the pacing going from one to the other could’ve done with serious tightening.
   Chandler’s anglophile attitude, his time spent in England, and his passport all soften the blow of seeing Marlowe in Albion. Still, Kit Marlowe was an English playwright – and that’s no coincidence as far as Chandler was concerned. A curiosity this one, that sits uneasily next to the first Mitchum movie thanks to the change in time and in space.
   Poodle Springs. This one is even more of a curio, given that it is a TV movie and that it is based on the fragment Chandler left behind. James Caan. (1998.)
   As I type, I haven’t seen all of these adaptations. I’ll hunt a few down, just as I hunted down the few remaining short stories. No, I won’t attempt to revisit the Elliott Gould travesty. (With Chandlerian cynicism, I watched a YouTube clip of the movie’s enthralling finale. I appear to have misused the word enthralling. Well. Damn.)
   I’ll end on a fine point as I chase these stories down. Just to clarify. If you want to try the fiction, read Chandler’s novels first. When you go to read the short stories, you’ll realise that he stitched several tales into the plots of his full books. Far better to read the books, before you tackle the prototype fiction.
   Prototype Marlowe, no matter the character’s name, comes across as leaner and meaner in the short stories. That’s reflected in the Powers Boothe TV show. You also see one part of a case clearly in a short story, and another part in a second tale. Sometimes even a third. While that construction, reconstruction, is interesting to me as a writer, as a reader it is easier to encounter those tales in the novel versions – if only to avoid a feeling of déjà vu. 

ON READING AN AUTHOR’S ENTIRE OUTPUT: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

What do I mean by entire output, exactly?
   I thought this over as I hunted around for books to photograph. Last month’s blog post called for a few book covers. Stevenson is represented in the margins of every blog post. No need to re-photograph Weir of Hermiston for that.
   When it came to Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, I was quite specific in seeking out tomes. My talk on Sir John Mortimer’s creation of the world-weary barrister, Rumpole, centred on a particular tale.
   There’s a shelf of le Carré books, minus A Legacy of Spies. That particular file must be located in another part of the registry. Can’t see it anywhere.

This shady piece of microfilm was smuggled across the French Sector while no one was looking.

Well, hunting for a belated prequel/sequel set me to thinking about an author’s output.
   What is it? Output.
   Essentially, it’s a collection of works written by a dead person. Chandler, Parker, Mortimer, and le Carré have death in common. Okay, we all have that. But this is a matter of putting certain writers into the past tense. Any new books by those writers will be gently compiled, or otherwise completed – flat-out written by other writers.
   Yes, in the case of a living author you can say I’ve read ’em all. In this loose category, output, we must include the living as well as the dead. But do we include all of the books? The short stories? Essays? Collected shopping lists? Magazine articles? Non-fiction work? Letters to the editor of a prominent national newspaper?
   Is there such a thing as a prominent national newspaper? How papery is the digital version of a newspaper? And how national? If it is digital, it is international. Beamed out into the ether, why, it is galactic whether received by aliens or not.
   We noticed that you are alien, and using an ad-blocker.
   But that is a diversion. I’ve read one Robert B. Parker book: the book started by Raymond Chandler. I don’t feel like tackling the rest of Parker’s stories. The Parker output is put out, and pouts.
   I read le Carré’s revisitation book, A Legacy of Spies, to see how he filled in some obvious plot blanks. Not holes. Just things we weren’t told originally. And I read it while le Carré was alive. There are a few of his books still to tackle.
   Will I read them all? I may get around to all of his espionage-themed books once I buy them. But I vividly recall shutting down very quickly as a reader when trying to wade through The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It’s le Carré’s affair novel, his divorce book, and it shows.
   I didn’t get far into the story. It takes a lot, a LOT, for a book to stop me in its tracks. I quickly gained the impression that I was reading a do-nothing book in which nasty characters collide with each other, only to flop around on the floor.
   Pudding, fallen from the hands of someone who wanted fish and chips. You could save the pudding, so that it doesn’t flop around on the floor. But what is the point of that? You wanted fish and chips. That’s why you crossed the street to try the chip shop’s wares.
   Reputation. You put out two murder mysteries starring a genteel civil servant named George Smiley. This Smiley character has a surname I suspect le Carré scubaconsciously lifted from a Colonel in the Special Operations Executive. Real and fictional Smiley types share an OBE.
   George Smiley the civil servant. Not a spy, or a spymaster. He’d hesitate to admit to a fellow intelligence officer that he, too, is an intelligence officer. In several books, le Carré seems hell-bent on describing Smiley as every character from The Wind in the Willows.
   The reputation of the author is cemented with that third book: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. That’s it. He’s an espionage writer. This continues with book four. And book five. Then it is time, once more, to head to the chip shop for fish and chips. Ah, here’s the pudding. That’s no good.
   Now that le Carré is gone, I have the opporchancity to read his entire output. Catch up on the last few novels he wrote. I’m dodging that earlier one. The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. With the best will in the world, I think that one should remain unread. The author quickly returned to proper intrigue with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In doing so, he went back to the reputation he cemented – and he painstakingly covered it in gold leaf.
   There is nothing proper about intrigue, and you’ll still find nasty characters colliding with each other in his stories. So I’ll buy the last few espionage tales I didn’t quite get around to. And I’ll read them. Then I can say I’ve read all of his spy novels.
   If they are spy books. They are easy enough to describe as condition-of-England novels in which a vampiric English upper-class cabal goes around selling out its more-dispensable people to shady notions of ethics and morality that are neither ethical nor moral – merely shady and notional under the thin blanket of being national.
   Graham Greene writes about betrayal. Betrayal as a theme runs through Greene’s work as clearly and consistently as the words Brighton Rock run through a stick of Brighton Rock. Book after book, betrayal is Graham Greene’s thing. It is the whole thing, cut in one piece, from a single sheet of literary cloth.
   In le Carré’s case, he uses betrayal, thematically, as a diffuse jumping-off point into examining a patchwork quilt of hypocrisy, double-dealing, and the pettiness of grand aims backed by low ways and means. Snobbery with violence. Cosh and carry.
   Where do you start, if you are going to read the output? At the beginning. I’ll avoid the plotting here. A character puts in an appearance in the first book, Call for the Dead. We see several familiar characters return in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
   I had a question about this.
   Eventually we reach Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, start of a loose trilogy within the overall Wagnerian cycle. Events in this book force up a point concerning The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I had a question about that, too.
   At a distance of many years, le Carré hands us a prequelish sequelish revisitation of a book – A Legacy of Spies. He addresses plot-based questions from previous works, and all is right with the cynicism in his world. If you are going to start anywhere with the output, A Legacy of Spies is absitively posolutely NOT the place to begin.
   With certain authors, you can dive right in and read the books in any old order. Not so with le Carré. His stories concerning Smiley are in a set pattern. I’d go further. Even the non-Smiley stories should be read in sequence. Tackle all the books in order of publication for a sense of atmosphere, Smiley-based or not. (Omit one book entirely. There. I saved you the bother.)
   Order of publication? That’s trickier with C.S. Lewis and the land of Narnia. After all this time, wars are still fought on the plains of Narnia over the order in which to read the stories. My advice on that score is to read them in the order that you found them in. I did.
   Lewis wrote the prequel story, The Magician’s Nephew, close to the end of the whole cycle – making it a prequel his initial audience couldn’t absorb in any other way on first reading. I, too, read that book close to the end. This was sheer coincidence, Jeeves. Never did me any harm. Lewis can be read that way. The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings can’t be.
   Output. I’ve read Tolkien’s three tomes. Never had an inclination to read The Hobbit or that ill-advised Marillion biography he churned out. I’d read Ian Fleming’s Bond books slightly out of sequence…
   Those were ordered through a bookshop, and the first to arrive was out of place. But I soon corrected that course. With Adam Hall’s Quiller stories, I read the first book first and the last book last – but everything else was a bit of a jumble. I based my reading on whatever was on sale in charity shops, until the last few missing tomes could only be located online.
   Rumpole I read in order. That doesn’t quite match the TV output. Usually, Sir John Mortimer would sneak an extra little story into the books – one that wouldn’t have made the running as a candidate for a one-hour TV slot.
   So much for the collected books. As for shopping lists, articles, and letters…
   A billion years ago, le Carré arm-wrestled Salman Rushdie into a froth when they exchanged different viewpoints across the bows of a national newspaper. The area reserved for letters sat near the back of the periodical, so, perhaps that should be the stern. And very stern they were, too.
   I am in no great rush to read Rushdie. The one-star reviews for The Satanic Verses are all kinds of livid. This brings up the point that I am wary of reviews in the sense that I may accidentally discover how Anna Karenina ends. Fear not. That was ruined for me by an introduction to a wildly different book that warned of Tolstoy spoilers in the most half-arsed way possible.
   No, I won’t tell you which one.
   For some, the correct order of reading for the tales about Narnia is…all of the books except for very near the end of The Last Battle. Wars are still fought in Narnia’s far-flung reaches over whether or not Susan is still a friend of Narnia, and what that all means at the very very very very last-gasp end of the cycle.
   What is the output? An author writes sixty books in a series and everyone agrees book three was a let-down only redeemed by the rapid fix of many mistakes in book fourteen. That was the master-plan all along, right? Wrong. Everyone has off-days. Some writers have fuck-off days.
   An author discovers success with a book, and, gradually, the sap rises through the Writerly tree until there is a series of books. A franchise. Eventually the author can’t cut it no more. People go to read and re-read the work. That fabled output. But they stop short of the shaky tome no one likes to mention.
   Such a shame that there is only one movie about The Matrix. What would a sequel have looked like? Sadly, we’ll never know. As for Highlander, in cinematic terms…there can be only one.
   Who can forget the Rambo trilogy? First Blood, Rambo, and Rambo: Last Blood. That, inevitably, brings us to THE STAR WARS. Let us draw a veil upon this scene. The film tie-in can throw up the odd quirk…
   If you want all of the output connected to a story, can you, should you, pursue it? The movie CAPRICORN ONE, for example, has two novelisations – one for each side of the Atlantic. Movie wheeling and movie dealing at its haziest.
   Once you throw in movies and comic books, you open Pandora’s Fridge and find all the cool boxes. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is available as the original book, the TV version with Bernard Hepton in a supporting role, the radio version with Bernard Hepton as Smiley himself, a second BBC radio production as part of an overall series about Smiley, the (condensed and sterilised) movie version with Gary Oldman…I’m waiting for the opera, the comic book, and the webisodes.
   Is the author’s output limited to the books? For simplicity, always. And for reasons of complexity, never. Of all the authors I’ve read, how much of their output have I read? Can I point to a writer and say I’ve read ’em all…
   I’m forced to stop and think about biographies with extracts from letters. But I’m not forced to stop too long. There’s one place where you can pick up a copy of Emily Brontë’s second novel – in the dream library of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series, The Sandman. Every story ever is there in the library, whether published or not. Whether written in the author’s lifetime or not.
   This is why Neil is such a furious scribbler. He’s trying to keep as many of his own books off those dream shelves as he can, by sending them out into the physical world instead.
   I haven’t mentioned the impossible task of reading all of an author’s books when that author goes by many different labels – not a fraction of them known to the general public. For that way, madness lies.
   The simplest task is to read the book by the author who only wrote one novel. Even so, what is the output? A few short stories, besides. Scattered letters, collected by scholars. The fragment of a second novel. A rough guide to the next one in a series.
   Unpublished. Published. Destroyed. Saved. Franz Kafka left his unpublished works in the hands of Max Brod, with the instruction that these documents were to be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Brod refused when the time came, and now we have Kafa’s “lost” output to stare at.
   Yes. Output is hazy when it isn’t there at all. I can reach out to my shelf and read of Jekyll and of Hyde, but I can’t read the original version – not if we take Stevenson at his word that he threw the manuscript into the fire. I, myself – quite rightly – shredded an entire document, just to be shot of an appalling construction of a non-tale.
   Not a file left. This was on a different computer system, and would be hard to retrieve even if it still existed. So what is an author’s output? Stories as-yet-unwritten? Adaptations. Fragments. Ghostly volumes, sitting in Dream’s fanciful library?
   Sir John Mortimer was tasked with stepping in and “fixing” Ray Bradbury’s work on the script for Something Wicked This Way Comes. Unfathomable movie decision, but there it is. Disney wanted a cute scary movie that wasn’t too cute and couldn’t be too scary.
   Does a movie adaptation by grand committee destroy the original story? The original story is still there on the bookshelves, after all. Turning to Ray Bradbury, we find in his work another difficult area in trying to get at the output: transatlantic publishing.
   It’s CAPRICORN ONE all over again. That movie serves as The Martian Chronicles without – spoiler alert – actually going to Mars. Spoiler spoiler alert – the spoiler wasn’t much of a spoiler.
   CAPRICORN ONE spews up a great idea. What if the Mars landing is faked? Holes in the plot? There are one or two hundred. The revelation that the movie spawned two movie tie-ins, one by Ken Follett and the other by Ron Goulart, reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s short story output. Ah, the output. Somewhere over the ocean, a few stories fell into the mist-wreathed waters…
   The Illustrated Man is part of Ray’s output. I’ve read it. Seen the movie. I am about to read the short stories again. For transatlantic reasons of the plot, this book was and is published with different short stories in it – depending where in the world you are.
   I have a copy with yarn blah-de-blah missing and tale doodle-ee-doo added. Yes, I’d characterise Ray as a writer of yarns and tales. Not necessarily science fiction. Another writer with transatlantic difficulties on the matter of output had a scathing view of Science Fiction.
   We return to Raymond Chandler for this one. He had a go at the style, for laughs. “I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels.” And so it goes.
   Yes, I’ve read The Long Good-Bye. More than once. Chandler lost a little focus in the writing of it, and accidentally changed the colour of a character’s hair along the way. Editors on one side of the ocean caught this. They also excised the miniature mystery over a very important suitcase.
   But away from America, on this side of the ocean, the suitcase mystery remains part of the book. It is a mystery that isn’t followed. There’s no twist to it. Any clues inside the suitcase go missing in the general plot. Chandler sets up part of a story and then abandons it.
   To this day, I still wonder what was in that case. American readers don’t wonder at all.
   The revolving door of stories featured in different editions of The Illustrated Man. A suitcase that may or may not appear in your copy of The Long Good-Bye. Are you prepared to track down the comic book adaptation of the movie of the opera of the pizza of the book?
   Will you discover, many years later, that a revised version of the sacred text was uncovered at an archaeological dig deep in the forests of Pern? Are you keen on the Michelin Restaurant Guide to the Inns and Taverns of Mordor…
   What is the output? It is whatever you find and in that inexact order. I’ve read ’em all, and then I’ve gone on to read some more. Conclusion? Even I haven’t read all of my own work. Many of my handwritten notes are illegible.

MORE INJURY FOR WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Another day, another injured digit.
   I suspect I'm on a quest to damage a finger or thumb each dawn. Some of those digits are definitely going to be mine.
   Despite the latest trauma, I republished seven times today. My recent formatting war with the back catalogue of prehistoric files forced something from the mirk.
   When that something surfaced from the depths, I went tsk. In the sense that I said fuck.

*

The project irresponsible is slim thriller. I've split the book into four chunks. Not hard to do - I wrote the book in four chunks.

And did those files in ancient time

Unfurl with ease upon the computer screen:

And was the formatting odd

On ev'ry effing paragraph seen!

   Sometimes, bringing old stories into line with e-book conventions is easy. That's not the case with this fossil.
   However, I spotted something awkward - meaning it wasn't wrong.
   It was, infuriatingly, right. I speak of the gargoyle. There's a gargoyle in the book. And I researched the word gargoyle before I wrote the gargoyle into my tale.
   A gargoyle gurgles.
   If a gargoyle doesn't divert water away from a building, it isn't a gargoyle.
   Remembering this bit of research from the hinterland of yesteryear, over the hills and very far away, I did the obvious thing.
   I ran a search for the word in my published works.
   And I saw that, in at least three cases, I'd gone on to use the term incorrectly much later.
   This brings up an important point. If you must correct something in an e-book, run a check on all of your books. When factual errors creep in, as they must, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
   If you research gargoyles, and write properly about them, hell, that doesn't stop you from writing improperly about them later.
   Gargoyles crawled over my work like, er, gargoyles on a cathedral. And I'd let the definition drift. That loose masonry needed fixing.
   I fixed.
   On top of that, I'm from the last generation to be taught the use of whom. If you find yourself using the word in your writing, here's some handy advice.
   Kill it - kill it with fire.
   I went through my published work and checked for usage. The word has the odour of bottled creatures to it.
   Though I didn't use the word much, I had the advantage of knowing how to use it. I'd say that's the same as not using a scythe much, but professing great skill just the same.
   Raymond Chandler defended the word, but I am not here to defend Raymond Chandler.
   And so...
   Welcome, anatomically accurate gargoyles. Farewell, whom. It lingers in my blog posts, but no more in my fiction. Gargoyles and whom forced me to republish seven books today. Our world survived the tumult.