Tag Archive: Raymond Chandler


NEUROMANCER by William Gibson (1984)

neuromancerI have a difficult relationship with this novel.

I know that it is one of the most groundbreaking and significant SF works ever written but each time I pick  it up I always get lost in the dense prose and what hits me as an overwhelming rush of jargon.

As most will know, this was where the word ‘cyberspace’ was first popularized and for that alone Gibson is assured of immortality, at least until the wires of that feed the human race are permanently unplugged.

He brilliantly describes the then fledgling internet as a “consensual hallucination” and the lead character Case is paid to hack into “the infinite neuroelectric void of the matrix”. Continue reading

SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT

HE WALKED BY NIGHT  directed by Alfred Werker (USA, 1948)

walk“The streets were dark with something more than night”, wrote Raymond Chandler in the introduction to his short story collection, Trouble Is My Business.

This could be the tag line for practically any of the American Noir movies of the 40s and 50s.

In these films, the criminals and killers lurk in the shadows pursued by upright, squeaky clean agents of the law.

The good versus evil is literally represented in black and white terms with a moralising tone that often makes the films quaint and faintly comical. They are a far cry from the many shades of grey in today’s cynical police procedurals. Continue reading

HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN?

dirty harry big gun

“Whenever you have a problem in a story with character or plot development have a man come in the room with a gun─and if it’s a big problem make it a big gun.”
– Raymond Chandler

“For me, love, in most fiction, is a big gun” – Annie Proulx.

” – I don’t believe people need guns.
Nobody keeps a gun unless he intends to use it.
– That’s been my experience, Corella said. ”
– Ed McBain (From ‘Heat’)

“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun”
– Jean-Luc Godard