Publishing day!

Today is the day that my new book, "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved" (Pantheon Books, $25.95) is hitting the bookstores and it feels like a red letter day. My cat Barney is sitting on my desk rubbing his cheek against my laptop. There's a framed picture of Chandler on my desk, just behind Barney, the one taken in 1948 showing Chandler sitting in his study in La Jolla, smoking a pipe, and holding his beloved big black Persian cat Taki in his lap. Later Chandler wrote across the top of this picture, "I had to hold Taki's tail to keep it still." He's looking down at Taki with such affection, and holding a big handfull of fluffy cat tail. Behind him in his study you can see a bookcase lined with books. Someone who once visited Chandler in this study reported being impressed by how Chandler spoke about his books---how it was clear that he'd read everything on his shelves. I haven't read everything on my shelves. There are a lot of books there I'll probably never read which I should give away, and some that I wish were there that I would like to read but don't yet own. I suppose the state of your bookshelves is a good indication of what kind of reader you really are. I need to put my bookshelves in order. But first I need to go on book tour. Today however I'm just thinking about Chandler, about how interesting it was to write this book about one of the most original and interesting writers America has ever produced. I love his fiction, but I also love his letters. He got so many things right, not just about LA and what an odd city this is, but about America, what a big rich corrupt society we are and how crime would be the price we'd have to pay for all our gluttony. He once said: "The story of our time is not the war nor atomic energy but the marriage of an idealist to a gangster and how their home life and children turned out." Hello, Sopranos! Crime and idealism, the opposite poles of America. What a genius he was.
This is the end of my first blog, on what is a very significant day.