Walter Mosley joins me at Mysterious Bookshop

Lots of good news about The Long Embrace, which was #8 last week on the LA Times Bestseller list. The book has been out now for just three weeks.

It's also the "Top Book Pick" of the week in the Dec. 3rd issue of Newsweek.

The review of The Long Embrace in the Dec. 6th issue of The New York Review of Books by Pico Iyer is a really a beautiful piece of writing. Don't miss it. I've always admired Pico's writing, and I think my new book gives him the chance to write a really stunning essay about Raymond Chandler, his work, and LA.

Rick Woodward will soon publish his list of his top twenty books of the year in a piece in the Village Voice which includes The Long Embrace.

And in the next issue of the Directors Guild of America's newsletter there will be a great review by John Patterson, who said that The Long Embrace was his favorite book of the year.

I'll be doing a reading in New York at Otto Penzler's wonderful store, Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren St., on December 4th, 6:30-8 p.m., and my friend Walter Mosley will be on hand that night to introduce me and I'm hoping we can have a conversation about Chandler and LA, and Walter's work, and discuss The Long Embrace. If you're in the neighborhood, I hope you'll stop by.

Mr. Chandler & Mr. Himes

It's been just over a week now since my new book, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, came out and today is the first day I haven't felt I've had to rush around and there's time to wrwite a new blog. It's hot today in LA. Nice to spend a morning home alone with Barney cat.

Last night I took a walk around the neighborhorhood, down to Third Street and over to Rampart, and then along Sixth Street to MacArthur Park. I walked round the lake, which had a ruby sheen on the water from the setting sun. Lots of black ducks with white bills, and a few long-necked geese. The lake smells awful, seems pretty foul, but the ducks looked happy. I love to see the neon signs of all the old apartments rising up against the sky---The Bryson, The Ansonia, The Asbury, The Royale---places that have been here since Chandler's time. The Bryson turns up in The Little Sister as the place where Dolores Gonzoles lives. My own street, Carondelet gets play in a couple of Chandler's stories, including Pearls Are A Nuisance. It was a ritzy part of the city then, known as Carondelet Park. Now it's grown much shabbier, an emigrant neighborhood, but I still love it for its liveliness and the way I can still feel Chandler here.

I'm reading James Sallis's biography of Chester Himes and am knocked out by Sallis's writing. He not only has a wonderful prose style, but he's so erudite, quoting other writers so liberally. Here are a few quotes I pulled out that I liked.

Ralph Ellison on James Joyce:
"Stephen's problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face; our task is that of making ourselves individuals."

Beware of coming to the surface,
And using for apparel what was meant
to be the curtain of the inmost soul.
Robert Frost

(aren't blogs a form of surfacing?)

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future of the world depends.
Wallace Stevens


The malaise of writing---and it is of no consequence whether the writer is talented or otherwise---is that after a time a man writing arrives at a point outside human relationships, becomes, as it were, ahuman."
Frederic Exley

Chester Himes and Raymond Chandler---I think they both arrived at that point, yet both needed their women and had intense relationships. Both, in fact, felt the need to rescue women. "I am completely blind to my own welfare," Himes wrote, "if there is a damsel in distress." Ditto Chandler. It didn't matter if the distress was real or imagined.

Here's another quote I love, this one from Nabokov: "A good reader must fondle the details. A good writer makes details to fondle."

Love that word fondle. I've always felt that fiction lives in details.

And now, a nap....

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.