Jacob's Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill

Author:Susan Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

IT ISN’T THE PLOT. It isn’t even the characters – although they are some of the best ever created by a novelist. It is the writing. The style. And even more, the crisp one-liners, the short, dazzling paragraphs that make you trip over yourself. You might be forgiven for thinking that his books, like Shakespeare’s plays, consist entirely of quotations:

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

So Raymond Chandler does consist entirely of quotations, any one of which would make another writer proud to have composed.

He is in a class of his own, a genius pure and simple, and every single time I re-read The Big Sleep, or The Little Sister, or The High Window – any of them – I am struck by his genius, his wit, his command of the language. He makes it do exactly what he wants it to do, no less and no more, and that is a talent given to very few. He invented the mean streets, the hard-boiled private eye, the sleazy little hotels, the cocktail bars as seen by the cold light of day as well as by the neon light of 2 a.m. He owned the whole set-up and, although he has had imitators – not too many, because most wannabes back off the moment they have tried to construct a sentence like any of his – he brushed them off like specks of fluff on his sleeve.

As well as the brilliant novels, he wrote some of the best analysis of crime fiction, of what works, what does not, and any aspiring writer in the genre should read and take permanent note of his golden advice. And then, if he likes, ignore it. Chandler would have said that. There are no rules but there are plenty of sensible observations. The one I took to heart at the very beginning of writing a crime series was that no fictional private eye, or detective, should ever marry.

I have just found another quotation, which isn’t a wise crack or a slick observation, just a piece of perfect descriptive writing (from The High Window):

The bar entrance was to the left. It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved moth-like against the faint glitter of piled glassware. A tall handsome blonde, in a dress that looked like sea-water sifted over with gold dust, came out of the Ladies’ Room touching up her lips, and turned towards the arch, humming.

I press Chandler on anyone who has not yet discovered him for themselves – and urge them to watch Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in any of the films.

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