Grant Snider / The Three Rays

THE THREE RAYS

By Grant Snider

FEB. 28, 2014

Grant Snider, an illustrator and cartoonist, draws the weekly online strip “Incidental Comics.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Book Review 062 / Raymond Chandler / The Big Sleep / Best of the genre

The Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

1939

Best of the genre

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novel / No 62 / The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)

My comments upon first reading Raymond Chandler's famous detective story, The Big Sleep, were all about how sparse and direct his prose was. Just the facts. Plain, chiselled sentences à la Hemingway and Hammett.

Maybe too plain and chiselled. I griped a bit about overall flatness. The narrator, Philip Marlowe (surnamed after the Elizabethan playwright) reacts to everything evenly and ironically—whether he's discovering a dead body, being shot at, or flirting with a frail (a woman). His continual punchy, declarative statements, uttered in the same sardonic tone, leave us little sense of really being there.

Besides, lots of people do plain and chiselled à la Hemingway and Hammett.

So how come I liked it so much?

Second time around, the plot of The Big Sleep seemed even more arbitrary, as if it didn't matter in the least. Despite Chandler's stated aim to drag mystery writing into the realm of realism, I could not really believe his characters were real people who existed and interacted as he had them doing. Not that they were outlandish. Just melodramatic in a way that might not have been noticeable back in 1939 when this book was a welcome breath of stale, American, big-city air in the genre dominated by the elegant and preposterous British mystery. With other U.S. writers, he got rid of the polite country-house and parsonage characters, replacing them with gangsters, gamblers, con artists and loose women. But such clever gangsters, gamblers, con artists and loose women. And engaged in more running in and out of rooms, gun shots in the dark, beatings and murders all in a couple days than any real private investigator is likely to see in an entire career.

Raymond Chandler / The new art of mistery writing

Raymond Chandler

The new art of mystery writing

He's commonly called the successor to Dashiell Hammett as the world's premier hard-boiled detective fiction writer. Some would say, greater than Hammett. His major creation, L.A. gumshoe Philip Marlowe, has become the archetypal private eye, more iconic and more enduring than any of Hammett's Continental Op, Sam Spade or Nick Charles, and more than any of the successive contenders like Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer or Robert B. Parker's Spenser.

Raymond Chandler shares much else with Hammett, besides having created a memorable character portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in a film noir classic. For one thing, he didn't publish all that much. But he started writing late in life—in 1933, right around the time Hammett was ending his publishing career. Chandler was forty-five when he first broke into print. (He was actually older than Hammett.)

He had been born in Chicago but was raised in England and studied law in France and Germany, before returning to the U.S. in 1912. He was in the Canadian army during the Great War and afterwards had jobs in business before his career failed during the Depression. Like Hammett a decade earlier, he began with stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask. In his lifetime he produced only seven novels—low output in the popular crime field.

His famous sleuth was also, like Hammett's protagonists, a man of principle. Despite his tough exterior and rough manners, Philip Marlowe follows a code of honour that stands out as endearingly old-fashioned in a corrupt, often vicious, world.

And like Hammett's works, Chandler's novels can be read as morality tales. Beneath all the roughhousing and sexual tension can be detected a critique of American society, run by greed and big money, that makes men like Marlowe necessary. Chandler's vision however may be less politically hard-nosed than his predecessor's (I don't think he was a Communist as Hammett was) and he may have held out greater hope for the redeeming value of individual goodness. It is surprising to find, once you add them up, how many of Chandler's hoodlums and vixens turn out to have good sides and do the honourable thing in a pinch. There's a sweet touch (though just a touch) of Damon Runyon sentimentality in Chandler, despite his insistence on absolute realism.

He also wrote with more poetry than any other crime writer of his time. Erupting among the spare, just-the-facts sentences are arresting lines setting a scene, a throwaway wisecrack, a novel description of a dead man, a creative account of what it's like to take a bullet and or have a punch land square on your face. Most of all though, it's in his wonderful dialogue. I'm not sure anyone ever talked that concisely and cleverly in real life, but when you read it you hope maybe they did. Macdonald said of his literary idol (and you'll find this quoted on a million book covers): "Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence."

A mixed-up story

Macdonald, who emulated Chandler, did criticize him though for not bothering to work out his plots. The narrative of a private detective going about trying to solve a mystery often doesn't make sense in a Chandler novel.

That is, if you notice. Chances are you become too wrapped in the scenes of human interaction—taut, relaxed, exciting, funny, sexy by turns—to pay much attention to how they are strung together. Chandler wrote wonderful scenes. And then he pops up every now and then with a clever insight to solve part of the mystery and you realize the information was there all along but you were too caught up in the personal give-and-take to notice.

Chandler's most famous novel is his first, The Big Sleep (1939), a notoriously mixed-up story, which nonetheless rewards successive readings. If you aren't familiar with the hard-boiled tradition, this is the novel to plunge into to get a sense of the genre's possibilities and difficulties.

Fan favourite Farewell, My Lovely (1940) is equally complex but the story benefits from periods when Marlowe stops to review the case, either alone or with a friend. It's also the novel in which we become more aware of Chandler's implied social critique—in the cops' reluctance to investigate the murder of blacks, in the corruption of civic politics and in the apparent evidence that good people can't get ahead in this world. Moreover, the sharp reader may pick up on the author's mockery of other wordsmiths, especially Hemingway and old-style mystery writers.

The Chandler novel most highly praised by critics however may be The Long Goodbye (1953). It shows the writer in late life losing patience with the crime genre and becoming more critical of society and modern life. It's a sprawling novel that only intermittently comes back to the mysteries to be solved—though quite rewardingly.

His other novels, which also rank among the best detective fiction ever written, are The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), and Playback (1958). All have been adapted for film.

But you needn't start Chandler with a novel. His earlier stories have been collected in a remarkable volume, The Simple Art of Murder (1950, reprinted 1988). It is introduced with an insightful, unsparing essay by the author, written late in his life, about his craft and those who practised it before him, being particularly critical of the so-called golden age of cosy British mysteries.

Trouble Is My Business (1950, reprinted 1988), a collection of four of his longer stories, is similarly diverting.

Chandler also turned out some good screenplays, not based on his own novels, for Hollywood. Among them are scripts for Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Strangers on a Train (1951). He was nominated for Academy Awards for the first two.

His last novel Playback also started as a screenplay in 1947–1948 but was never produced despite being top-notch film work. You can read Chandler's final draft in Raymond Chandler's Unknown Thriller: The Screenplay of Playback (1985). Chandler cannibalized many of the characters and situations from the screenplay, and added Marlowe's point of view and much more to create the novel of the same name a decade later.

Chandler's unfinished novel Poodle Springs was completed by Parker in 1989. Interestingly, in his last few works we see Marlowe moving toward a kind of domesticity with a well-to-do woman (introduced in The Long Goodbye) who can almost match him for spirit. The pairing is reminiscent of Nick and Nora Charles in Hammett's last detective novel and is a precursor of the more sensitive detectives in the hands of Parker and others.

Parker also wrote a sequel to The Big Sleep called Perchance to Dream (1990), about which the less said the better.

A better tribute to Chandler is the 1988 collection Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, which offers twenty-three Marlowe stories by other leading mystery writers, plus a pretty good previously unpublished story by the master himself.

ERIC EDITOR

Bogart and Bacall / The Big Sleep

Bogart and Bacall

THE BIG SLEEP

The 100 best novel / No 62 / The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)

John Banville On Marlowe, Quirke — And George Clooney

John Banville
by David Levine

John Banville On Marlowe, Quirke — And George Clooney

Ed Siegel

April 3, 2014

The contrasts in John Banville’s writing are ever intriguing. His novels often have an air of the supernatural in them but are thoroughly grounded in reality. The Quirke crime novels written under the name Benjamin Black resolve who done it, but there’s a lingering question of how much others, beyond the reach of Irish law in the 1950s, have gotten away with.

He wasn’t the most likely crime writer, then, to be selected to write the latest Philip Marlowe novel. The late Robert Parker, who finished a previous Marlowe book, “Poodle Springs,” was closer to Raymond Chandler’s sensibilities than Black, though the book by many accounts was not a success. (I gave up on it.) Black’s contribution, “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” by most accounts, is.

Michael Connelly
Photo by Miriam Berkley

Michael Connelly's Top Ten List

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Michael Connelly (born 1956) is an American author of detective novels and crime fiction best known for his series featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch and another featuring criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His bestselling books have been translated into dozens of languages. After working for years as crime reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, he published his first novel, The Black Echo, in 1992, which introduced Bosch. Other novels in the series include The Black Ice (1993),The Closers (2005), The Black Box (2012) and The Burning Room (2014). The Haller series (several of which feature Bosch) includes The Lincoln Lawyer(2005), The Brass Verdict (2008) and The Gods of Guilt (2013). Connelly has won almost every major award given to mystery writers in the United States - including the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, Macavity Award and the Nero Award – and many international awards, including the Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France), Grand Prix Award (France) andPremio Bancarella Award (Italy).

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). Perhaps the most searching fable of the American Dream ever written, this glittering novel of the Jazz Age paints an unforgettable portrait of its day — the flappers, the bootleg gin, the careless, giddy wealth. Self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, determined to win back the heart of the girl he loved and lost, emerges as an emblem for romantic yearning, and the novel’s narrator, Nick Carroway, brilliantly illuminates the post–World War I end to American innocence.

2. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939). Hollywood is not alluring in this savage, apocalyptic novel about fame and its perversions. Painter Tod Hackett comes to Hollywood to design sets and find success. Instead, he finds a population of the physically and psychically maimed crouching at the edges of the film industry, desperately believing that only luck and time separate them from stardom. At the end, their disappointment explodes into violence and Tod sums up his despair with his single great painting: The Burning of Los Angeles.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960). Tomboy Scout and her brother Jem are the children of the profoundly decent widower Atticus Finch, a small-town Alabama lawyer defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. Although Tom Robinson’s trial is the centerpiece of this Pulitzer Prize–winning novel —raising profound questions of race and conscience —this is, at heart, a tale about the fears and mysteries of growing up, as the children learn about bravery, empathy, and societal expectations through a series of evocative set pieces that conjure the Depression-era South.

4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962). In Ken Kesey’s first novel, the insane asylum becomes an allegory for the larger world as the patients are roused from their lethargy by the arrival of Randall Patrick McMurphy, a genial, larger than life con man who fakes insanity to get out of a ninety-day prison sentence. By the time McMurphy learns that he is now under the cruel control of Nurse Ratched and the asylum, he has already set the wheels of rebellion in motion. Narrated by Chief Broom Bromden, an Indian who has not spoken in so long he is believed to be deaf and mute, McMurphy’s rebellion is a spectacular foretelling of what the 1960s were to bring.

5. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1962). After flying forty-eight missions, Yossarian, a bomber pilot in World War II, is going crazy trying to find an excuse to be grounded. But the military has a catch, Catch 22, which states, (a) a sane man must fight, unless (b) he can prove he is insane, in which case (a) must apply —for what sane person doesn’t want to avoid fighting? This novel is a congery of appallingly funny, logical, logistical, and mortal horrors. It defined the cultural moment of the 1960s, when black humor became America’s pop idiom.

6. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940). Hemingway’s ambivalence toward war —its nobility and its pointlessness —are delineated in this account of Robert Jordan, an idealistic American professor who enlists with the antifascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Jordan’s idealism is quickly tested by the bloody reality of combat and the cynical pragmatism of his comrades.

7. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953). Chandler’s sardonic and chivalric gumshoe Philip Marlowe winds up in jail when he refuses to betray a client to the Los Angeles police investigating the murder of a wealthy woman. Marlowe’s incorruptibility and concentration on the case are challenged even more when the obsessively independent private eye falls in love, apparently for the first time, with a different rich and sexy woman. She proposes marriage, but he puts her off, claiming he feels “like a pearl onion on a banana split” among her set.

8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969). Part science fiction, part war story, this is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a former World War II prisoner of war who survived the firebombing of Dresden, as did Vonnegut himself. Abducted by visitors from the planet Trafalmadore, Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time” and is thus able to revisit key points in his life and even his future. Written at the height of the Vietnam War, this muscular satire reveals the absurdity and brutality of modern war.

9. The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1976). It is 1953 and Russian spies are everywhere, according to Fightin’ Joe McCarthy. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are scheduled to fry in the electric chair in Times Square, and Uncle Sam has delegated Vice President Richard Nixon (who narrates much of the story) to ensure that the show goes off. Coover is a master of lingos, from Uncle Sam’s Davy Crockett yawps to Nixon’s resentful Rotarian tones. Oddly, Tricky Dick comes off as a rather endearing soul, a 1950s Everyman helplessly folded, spindled, and mutilated in Coover’s funhouse mirrors.

10. Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain (1941). After shedding her philandering, unemployed husband, Mildred Pierce works menial jobs to support her two children before discovering a gift for making and selling pies in Depression-era California. She’s a strong woman with two fatal flaws —an attraction to weak men and blind devotion to her monstrously selfish daughter Veda. These weaknesses join to form a perfect storm of betrayal and murder in this hard-boiled tale.

THE TOP TEN

Double Indemnity / No 6 best crime film of all time

Double Indemnity: No 6 best crime film of all time: No 6 best crime film of all time

Billy Wilder, 1944

Ryan Gilbey
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.50 BST

C

ameron Crowe called Double Indemnity "flawless film-making". Woody Allen declared it "the greatest movie ever made". Even if you can't go along with that, there can be no disputing that it is the finest film noir of all time, though it was made in 1944, before the term film noir was even coined. Adapting James M Cain's 1935 novella about a straight-arrow insurance salesman tempted into murder by a duplicitous housewife, genre-hopping director Billy Wilder recruited Raymond Chandler as co-writer. Chandler, said Wilder, "was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence". Noir's visual style, which had its roots in German Expressionism, was forged here, though Wilder insisted that he was going for a "newsreel" effect. "We had to be realistic," he said. "You had to believe the situation and the characters, or all was lost." And we do. Fred MacMurray, who had specialised largely in comedy until that point, was an inspired choice to play the big dope Walter Neff, who narrates the sorry mess in flashback, and wonders: "How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?" Edward G Robinson is coiled and charismatic as Neff's colleague, a claims adjuster who unpicks the couple's scheme.

But the ace in the hole is Barbara Stanwyck as Phyliss Dietrichson, a vision of amorality in a "honey of an anklet" and a platinum wig. She can lower her sunglasses and make it look like the last word in predatory desire. And she's not just a vamp: she's a psychopath. There are few shots in cinema as bone-chilling as the close-up on Stanwyck's face as Neff dispatches Phyliss's husband in the back seat of a car. Miklós Rózsa's fretful strings tell us throughout the picture: beware. Stanwyck had been reluctant to take the role, confessing: "I was a little frightened of it." Wilder asked whether she was an actress or a mouse. When she plumped for the former, he shot back: "Then take the part."

THE GUARDIAN

Chinatown / The best crime film of all time

Touch of Evil / No 2 best crime film of all time

Vertigo / No 3 best crime film of all time

Badlands / No 4 best crime film of all time

Rashomon / No 5 best crime film of all time

Double Indemnity / No 6 best crime film of all time

Get Carter / No 7 best crime film of all time

Pulp Fiction / No 8 best crime film of all time

Hidden / No 9 best crime film of all time

Goodfellas / No 10 best crime film of all time

Bonnie and Clyde / No 11 best crime film of all time

The Conversation / No 12 best crime film of all time

Raymond Chandler / The trap

Raymond Chandler

THE TRAP

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.


Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

The 100 best novel / No 62 / The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 62

 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)

Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled debut brings to life the seedy LA underworld – and Philip Marlowe, the archetypal fictional detective

Robert McCrumb
Monday 24 November 2014

E

nter Philip Marlowe, one of the great characters in the Anglo-American novel, a protagonist to rival and possibly surpass Sherlock Holmes. Marlowe holds the key to the enduring appeal of this novel and the six that followed. In 1951, Chandler told his publisher, “It begins to look as though I were tied to this fellow for life.”

Maybe he should not have been surprised. Chandler fully understood the archetypal fictional detective, and had been polishing the character for years. In The Simple Art of Murder (1950) he describes such a man in a famous passage:

“He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man… He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”

Chandler might have been describing Philip Marlowe, who made his debut in this first novel, after several appearances in Chandler’s pulp fiction stories. He once observed of his celebrated style: “I’m an intellectual snob who happens to have a fondness for the American vernacular, largely because I grew up on Latin and Greek.”

Raymond Chandler

Chandler, like PG Wodehouse, who will feature later in this series, had been educated at Dulwich College, a school founded by Edward Alleyn, the great actor-manager whose company, the Admiral’s Men, included the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great rival. In Chandler’s stories, his protagonist also appears as “Mallory”. He is a 20th-century knight who treads the mean streets of Hollywood and Santa Monica, and who also visits the houses of the stinking rich, with their English butlers, corrosive secrets and sinister vices. Chandler plays with this medieval conceit in surreal metaphors. For instance: “It was a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”In The Big Sleep – the title refers to the gangster euphemism for death – Marlowe is summoned to the home of old General Sternwood whose wild daughter, Carmen, is being blackmailed by a seedy bookseller. But The Big Sleep transcends its genre, moving WH Auden to write that Chandler’s thrillers “should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”.

The plot, notorious for its complexity, soon spirals into a world of pornography, gambling and Hollywood lowlife. It’s not flawless, and there are some loose ends. When Howard Hawks filmed the novel he asked, “Who killed the chauffeur?” and Chandler replied that he had no idea. To him, plot was always subordinate to character, mood and atmosphere.

A note on the text

Chandler published his first detective story, in the pulp fiction magazine Black Mask, at the end of 1933. He explained this departure to his British publisher: “Wandering up and down the Pacific coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women’s magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask… and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest.” Between these beginnings and 1938, when he began to write The Big Sleep, he wrote 21 Black Mask stories, developing and honing the qualities of his mature work. A late starter, he came to this world as an outsider, a middle-aged English public schoolboy adrift in California. However, he caught on quick. The early stories have several Marlowe prototypes, LA settings, good and bad cops mixed into the regular crime cocktail of violence, drugs, sex and booze.

When he came to write The Big Sleep, Chandler “cannibalised” (his own description) his stories. The central plot of the novel comes from two stories, Killer in the Rain (published in 1935) and The Curtain (published in 1936). Both stories were standalone tales, sharing no common characters, but they had similarities. In each, there’s a strong father distressed by his wild daughter. Chandler melded the two fathers to make a new character and also did the same for the stories’ two daughters. There are other sources, too. Like Carmen Sternwood, his own much-loved wife Cissy had posed nude as a young woman and, like Carmen, taken opium. Marlowe’s alcohol problems reflect Chandler’s own latent alcoholism. In virtually every scene of a Chandler novel, someone is lighting a cigarette, or having a drink.

The Big Sleep was published in the spring of 1939. Despite collecting an impressive retinue of literary admirers, including Somerset Maugham and, later, Edmund Wilson, the Knopf (US) edition sold barely 13,000 copies, though it did better in France and England. It did not begin to attract serious international attention until after the appearance of Howard Hawks’s film starring Humphrey Bogart.

In 1959, the year of Chandler’s death, his great English admirer Ian Fleming permitted himself a discreet nod of homage. Towards the end of James Bond’s confrontation with Goldfinger, he passes through an airport and buys a book about golf – and the latest Chandler.

Three more from Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely (1940); The Little Sister (1949); The Long Goodbye (1953).

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)

059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)