Reading and Escapism! - By Dr Luke Deckard

Raymond Chandler criticised Dorothy L Sayers in his essay The Simple Art of Murder (1950) for commenting that crime fiction wasn’t a serious type of literature but one of escapism. She’s not the only one to snub the genre that was an author’s bread and butter. Before Sayers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously hated Sherlock Holmes! He didn’t want to be remembered solely for that character because he felt they were silly, unimportant stories. 

I can imagine Raymond Chandler sitting at his desk, reading these quotes while swishing a glass of whisky, pausing to look at his cat and huff. Chandler’s rebuttal to Sayers was simple: all pleasurable reading is a form of escapism. If that meant your jam was mathematics, philosophy, or Western or romance, that was fine. Chandler disagreed with Sayers’s implication that escapist literature is essentially dumb and unimportant literature. 

Nevertheless, this attitude persists today. I once read a press release for a book described as a “frothy thriller” That baffled me! A book without substance! I would be devastated if my work was described as frothy! I instantly felt bad for the author. My reaction couldn’t have been unlike Chandler’s when reading Sayers’s comments. But it’s not uncommon to see people on social media describe a film or a book as ‘turn your brain off fun’ or ‘you don’t have to think about it.’

This attitude of disposable, empty, forgettable storytelling is far too common. And is often used to excuse poorly told stories. 

When I started to write bad Blood, it was for my PhD at Kingston University. One of the most challenging aspects at the start was battling with the idea of how to make this book meaningful and live up to the quality of what a PhD novel should be. I was dead set on writing a historical noir. I wanted gangsters, femme fatales, and a tough-talking yet charming PI. I wanted it to be thrilling, fun, and sexy. 

But is that literary? Is that good enough? Hard-boiled fiction was birthed out of pulp magazines printed on cheap disposable paper. Were the tricks and tropes just as disposable today? Was there any literary appeal left? I wrestled with these questions. 

In the same essay, Raymond Chandler says that form doesn’t matter; it’s style that counts. What he meant was you can write any ole genre, but it is the author’s flare that makes it pop and stand out. Then, Chandler’s criticism of Sayers and his comments on style all clicked. I knew what I needed to do: escape into the genre. I needed to embrace the form shamelessly and respectfully while making it my own.

That’s what Chandler was getting at—there is no literature of escape in a derogatory sense. Meaning no single genre is less than simply because of its formula.

The filmmaker Robert Meyer Burnett once phrased what audiences are genuinely after: they want good stories told well. Genre is irrelevant. The form isn’t the it thing that makes something work. It’s all about style! The execution. That’s why you can read two books in the same genre and love one but hate the other. Audiences don’t seek out bad, forgettable, disposable art. So, we writers shouldn’t treat stories as such. When we’re hungry, we don’t go into a restaurant and say, ‘Give me the worst thing on the menu, please!’ We want something delicious. 

When I think about the book described as a frothy thriller, what the headline was trying to say was it’s a fun ride. The word choice of frothy was a mistake. The value of fiction doesn’t come from the seriousness of its content or ‘realism’, but from the joy the readers have with a well-executed story. That’s what Burnett means by a good story told well.

And that’s what I attempted to do with Bad Blood. It wasn’t about ‘writing literature’ or trying to make something more out of it. The form is the form. So I wrote it for the people who love noir fiction, who love historical fiction, who love Edinburgh, and tough and gritty atmospheres. There was no shame in embracing the tropes and trying to subvert a few along the way! If someone escapes into my book, that’s a beautiful achievement! 

So readers, feel free to escape into fiction! It’s not a bad thing. But do keep your brains switched on!

Bad Blood by Luke Deckard (Sharpe Books) Out Now

London 1922. American ex-pat Logan Bishop, suffering from shell-shock and an addiction to morphine, is working as a Private Investigator. When Logan’s father, Reverend Daniel Bishop, arrives from Chicago, desperate to see his son, Logan wants nothing to do with him. That is, until his father is brutally attacked. Daniel begs his son to find Greta Matas, a Bolshevik woman with an unknown connection to his father, in Edinburgh before she is murdered. Before Logan can learn more, his father slips into a coma. Logan takes the first train to Edinburgh. The journey proves far from routine, however, and two mysterious men follow the investigator out of Waverley Station. Logan soon discovers that Greta is missing and her son, Peter, is wanted for murder. The case begins to take a darker and deadlier turn than he ever imagined. As Edinburgh police suspect Logan of keeping information from them, the pressure to find Greta and her son increases. Secrets and lies are exposed as Logan clashes with Chicago gangsters, the authorities, and Edinburgh’s elite to expose the truth behind the woman's disappearance.

You can find Bad Blood on Amazon UK and Amazon US

More information about Dr Luke Deckard can be found on his website. You ca also find him on X @LukeWritesCrime. You can also find him on Facebook.

The Return of Penguin Greens

 

From the 1930s onwards crime novels published by Penguin had covers using a lot of green ink. This led to a clear distinction between two different kinds of novel – effectively all other novels (orange) and crime novels (green). This had the unintended effect of implying that these were different reading experiences or had different statuses when, of course, some ‘crime’ novels are simply among the best novels of any kind whereas orange novels came to seem more middle- to-upper brow even if they might be in practice be much less well written, ambition and plausible than novels by Dorothy M. Sayers, say, or Raymond Chandler. 

Famously it was on returning from a visit to Agatha Christie that Allen Lane, standing on a platform at Exeter station, had the idea for Penguin paperbacks and in the 1950s he once celebrated Christie’s birthday by printing in one go a million copies of her books (10 different novels x 100,000).

Crime of every description has therefore, from the most horrific to the most genteel, always stood at the heart of the entire Penguin enterprise. For reasons not now clear in the 1980s it was decided to drop the green spine and publish all fiction with an orange spine. Then design moved on again, often restricting the Penguin element to the bird logo itself and only keeping hints of Penguin orange. Around the same time light blue Pelicans were also dropped, with the Penguin colour schemes restricted to the black-spined Penguin Classics or the various shades of eau-de-Nil and grey for Penguin Modern Classics.

I have published various series as a Penguin employee over the years—Great Ideas, Little Black Classics and others—and it is really almost with a sense of embarrassment that it has taken until 2023 to realize that one of the most potent and fun traditional Penguin colour codes was simply lying around waiting to be reused: Green for Crime. I mention this because it is at some level shameful that it should have taken so many years to come up with something so straightforward that it barely qualifies as a concept or an idea: why didn’t we do this a decade ago? Two decades?

Lurking within Penguin Modern Classics we already published some of the greatest crime writers – Dorothy B. Hughes’s sensational In a Lonely Place, Eric Ambler’s great pre-War thrillers, Chester Himes’s wonderful, frenzied fantasies of Harlem, Ross Macdonald’s novels of southern California’s squalor lurking under the pretty surface. I am myself responsible at Penguin for the backlist of two great writers in the genre, John le Carré and Len Deighton, and yet had not noticed until very recently that these could be assembled into a matchless series of the greatest crime writers.

Once, very belatedly, we decided to proceed with the idea it seemed a shame not to add other writers. We already published Georges Simenon’s extraordinary books, of which he wrote so many (and at such a consistent level of excellence) that it would make sense to showcase a couple simply to give readers a way into his enormous oeuvre. Josephine Tey’s novels had just come out of copyright, so this provided the opportunity to publish her superb, unsettling The Franchise Affair and Brat Farrar. We also had C.S. Forester’s wonderfully nasty little shocker Payment Deferred about a murderous South London miser (written long before Forester became famous for the Hornblower novels).

For the series to be fresh though it needed some new discoveries and a lot of time was spent reading sometimes terrible books (please do not read anything by Peter Cheyney!) but also books which had just aged badly. I was particularly sorry that Helen MacInnes now seemed so lacklustre as my parents had loved her novels of international espionage when they were published – but now they seemed to consist predominantly of people endlessly walking around, having meals and checking into hotels, with very occasional outbursts of unengaging and tasteful violence.

Battling through some quite neither-here-nor-there stuff though made it much easier to spot wonderful things. Many recent crime novelists remain in print because of Kindle editions or print-on-demand versions, but it was very exciting to find two giants of British thriller writing from the 1970s and 1980s, Anthony Price and Michael Gilbert, available to be discovered. Both giants in their day, their work still has an ingenuity and excellence which has in no way dated – so Price’s Other Paths to Glory and Gilbert’s Game Without Rules joined the list. And I was tipped off to try Dick Lochte, whose 1985 debut Sleeping Dog is a classic, extremely funny piece of neo-noir with the simple but useful advice: if you are a jaded private investigator in L.A. and a girl on roller-skates asks you to help her find her missing dog, don’t say yes. The other great find was the Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo (real name Tarō Hirai – his pen name derives from the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allen Poe). Between the wars he wrote a number of thrilling and disturbing classics, some with a wonderful Tintin-like flavour (Gold Mask and The Black Lizard) and others with the depravity dialled up (Beast in the Shadows). All three of these are in the series. 

We are now finishing work on a third set of ten, including some just wonderfully recommendable stuff! Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love, Anthony Price’s The Labyrinth Makers and John le Carré’s The Night Manager. Best of all (but of course they are all best) is a long forgotten classic of New York City noir, The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin, set in a gloomy wartime Manhattan and Coney Island. The fate of its decent psychiatrist hero as he unwillingly wades deeper and deeper into an inexplicable, surreal and truly horrible urban underbelly has to be experienced to be believed.

Here are the three sets, with the third not published until June 2024:

1. Davis Grubb NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
2. Edogawa Rampo BEAST IN THE SHADOWS
3. Dorothy B. Hughes IN A LONELY PLACE
4. Josephine Tey THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR
5. Eric Ambler JOURNEY INTO FEAR
6. John le Carré CALL FOR THE DEAD
7. Georges Simenon MAIGRET AND THE HEADLESS CORPSE
8. Len Deighton SS-GB
9. Ross Macdonald THE DROWNING POOL
10. Chester Himes COTTON COMES TO HARLEM
11. Dick Lochte SLEEPING DOG
12. Raymond Chandler THE BIG SLEEP & FAREWELL, MY LOVELY
13. Anthony Price OTHER PATHS TO GLORY
14. Michael Gilbert GAME WITHOUT RULES
15. Georges Simenon MAIGRET’S REVOLVER
16. C.S.Forester PAYMENT DEFERRED
17. Edogawa Rampo THE BLACK LIZARD
18. Eric Ambler THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS
19. Josephine Tey BRAT FARRAR
20. John le Carré TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
21. Anthony Price THE LABYRINTH MAKERS
22. Chester Himes A RAGE IN HARLEM
23. John le Carré THE NIGHT MANAGER
24. Edogawa Rampo GOLD MASK
25. Ian Fleming FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
26. Georges Simenon NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS
27. John Franklin Bardin THE DEADLY PERCHERON
28. Ross Macdonald THE UNDERGROUND MAN
29. Shirley Jackson WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE
30. Cornell Woolrich I MARRIED A DEAD MAN

Any suggestions anyone might have for unfairly out-of-print crime and espionage classics would be warmly received!

Simon Winder is the Publishing Director at Penguin Press. 

Penguin Classic Crime & Espionage -- 2nd tranche coming soon!

Reviving the iconic green Penguin Crime paperbacks, first published 75 years ago, this new series celebrates the endless variety and unique appeal of one of fiction’s great genres. The series, which continues to grow, is a careful selection of the very best from Penguin Classics’ extensive archives, combined with new discoveries unearthed from the golden age of crime and well overdue a new readership. The first tranche of titles, released in Summer 2023, took us from a sunshine soaked, yet bullet ridden California to a macabre Tokyo flat. Now the second tranche is here to take us through to Autumn with the best fireside reading for armchair detectives.

The series is carefully curated by author and Penguin Press publishing director Simon Winder, who is available for publicity: “These books are united by atmosphere, anxiety, a strong sense of time and place, and an often-appalling ingenuity, both on behalf of the authors and their characters. They have also all aged very well, gaining an additional pleasure from shifts in manners, clothes, wisecracks, politics, murder weapons and potential alibis.”

‘I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room’

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely | Raymond Chandler | 1939 & 1940

There are no streets meaner than those of L.A.'s underworld - but luckily one detective has more than his fair share of street smarts. Here, in the first two novels featuring the immortal creation Philip Marlowe, we see the cynical sleuth taking on a nasty case of blackmail involving a Californian millionaire and his two devil-may-care daughters; then dealing with a missing nightclub crooner (plus several gangsters with a habit of shooting first and talking later).

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 but moved to England with his family when he was twelve. During the Depression era, he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later by his first novel, The Big Sleep. 

Game Without Rules | Michael Gilbert | 1967

In a peaceful Kent village, Mr Behrens lives with his aunt at the Old Rectory, where he plays chess and keeps bees. His friend Mr Calder lives nearby with Rasselas, a golden deerhound of unnatural intelligence. No one would suspect that they are in fact working for British Intelligence, carrying out the jobs that are too dangerous for anyone else to handle - whether it's wiping out traitors, Soviet spies or old Nazis - in these gloriously entertaining stories.

Michael Gilbert was born in Lincolnshire in 1912. He worked as a lawyer and wrote his novels exclusively when commuting by train, 500 words a day in 50-minute stints. He was made a CBE in 1980, awarded a Diamond Dagger for the Crime Writers Association for lifetime achievement, and named a 'grandmaster' by the Mystery Writers of America in 1988. 

Maigret’s Revolver | Georges Simenon | 1952

Inspector Maigret receives a call from his wife to say he has a visitor at their apartment. But when he gets home, the young man has already gone, along with Maigret's prized Smith and Wesson .45. The trail to find the culprit - and the woman who may become his victim - takes Maigret across Paris and all the way to the Savoy Hotel in London. But getting to the truth may be even more complicated than he had first imagined.

Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903. He is best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret novels and his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories have made him a household name in continental Europe. He died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.

Sleeping Dog | Dick Lochte | 1985

Leo Bloodworth, 'the Bloodhound', is a world-weary L.A. gumshoe with a reputation for finding anything - and a low tolerance of precocious teenagers. Serendipity Dahlquist is a precocious teenager. When the headstrong, roller-skating fourteen-year-old asks Bloodworth to help track down her lost dog Groucho, it leads this oddest of odd couples into the dark criminal underworld of the Mexican mafia, and into more trouble than they'd bargained for.

Dick Lochte's first novel, Sleeping Dog was published to enormous acclaim. He was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times for several decades, and formerly president of both the American Crime Writers League and the Private Eye Writers of America. Born in New Orleans, Lochte now lives on the West Coast.

Brat Farrar | Josephine Tey | 1949

Twenty-one-year-old Brat Farrar is an orphan, alone in the world without friends or family. So when he is offered the unexpected chance to impersonate Patrick Ashby, the long-lost heir to a vast fortune on a country estate, he agrees. Brat is the spitting image of Patrick, who disappeared years ago. At first it seems Brat can pull off this incredible deception, until he starts to realise that he is in far greater peril than he ever imagined.

Josephine Tey began to write full-time after the successful publication of her first novel, The Man in the Queue (1929), which introduced Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard. It wasn't until after the Second World War that the majority of her crime novels were published. Born in Inverness, Tey died in 1952, leaving her entire estate to the National Trust.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | John le Carré | 1974

George Smiley, formerly of the Secret Intelligence Service, is contemplating his new life in retirement when he is called back on an unexpected mission. His task is to hunt down an agent implanted by Moscow Central at the very heart of the Circus - one who has been buried deep there for years. The dogged, troubled Smiley can discount nobody from being the traitor, even if it is one of those closest to him.

John le Carré was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. After a peripatetic childhood, a spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6), during which he published his first novel. He gained a worldwide reputation for his subsequent books. Le Carré died in December 2020. 

The Black Lizard | Edogawa Rampo | 1934

They call her the 'Dark Angel'. Queen of Tokyo's underworld, Mme Midorikawa is famed for her beauty, her jewels and the tattoo of a black lizard on her arm. Crime is so easy for her that she warns her victims in advance. When a wealthy jewel merchant receives letters saying his precious daughter Sanae is about to be kidnapped, he entrusts the renowned detective Akechi Kogoro to protect her. But he may have met his deadliest adversary yet...

Edogawa Rampo was the pseudonym of Taro Hirai, generally viewed as the greatest of all Japanese suspense and mystery authors. He was a prolific novelist and short story writer. Much influenced by writers such as Conan Doyle, Chesterton and Wells, his pseudonym is a Japanese transliteration of Edgar Allen Poe's name. Many of his works have been made into films. 

Payment Deferred | C.S. Forester | 1940

Bank clerk William Marble is facing financial ruin - until a visit from a wealthy young relative, a bottle of Cyanide and a shovel offer him an unexpected solution. But there is no such thing as the perfect murder. Gradually Marble becomes poisoned by guilt and fear, and his entire family corrupted. Sooner or later his deed will catch up with him, as events spiral out of control in the most unpredictable of ways...

C. S. Forester was born in 1899 in Cairo, where his father was a government official. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he entered the Ministry of Information. As well as the famous Horatio Hornblower series, his novels include The African Queen, adapted into the famous film, and crime novels Plain Murder and The Pursued.

The Mask of Dimitrios | Eric Ambler | 1939

English writer Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when a police inspector tells him about the infamous master criminal Dimitrios, long wanted by the law, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Immediately fascinated, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios' steps across Europe to gather material for a new book, but instead finds himself descending into a terrifying underworld of international espionage, Balkan drug dealers, unscrupulous businessmen and fatal treachery - one he may not be able to escape.

Eric Ambler was born in London. He studied engineering but left college and became a copywriter in the advertising industry, before publishing his great spy thrillers and working as a screenwriter. His profound influence on the espionage genre has been acknowledged by writers including Ian Fleming and John le Carré.

Other Paths to Glory | Anthony Price | 1974

Paul Mitchell is a young military historian whose life is changed forever when two men, Dr Audley and Colonel Butler of the MOD, visit him with a fragment of a German trench map - and a lot of questions. Then somebody tries to kill him. Paul, his life now in danger, agrees to go underground on a mission to solve a dangerous mystery: what really happened during the battle of the Somme in 1916? And why does somebody want to keep it secret?

Anthony Price was born in Hertfordshire. He began as a crime reviewer on the Oxford Mail and ending as editor of the Oxford Times. He won the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger for his first novel The Labyrinth Makers, and the Gold Dagger for Other Paths to Glory, which was later shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers Award for the best crime novel of the last 50 years.

Forty years with Varg Veum by Gunnar Staalesen

In June it is forty years since the first novel about Varg Veum was published in Norway. It bears the title Bukken til havresekken and is still not translated into English. The title comes from an old Norwegian saying: ‘You do not tell the buck to watch the bag of oats.’ (Bukken til havresekken translates directly as: ‘The buck to the bag of oats’.) The French edition was called: Le Loup dans la bergerie, which means ‘The wolf in the sheepfold’ and therefore has a similar meaning: ‘You don’t ask a wolf to look after the sheep.’ But in Germany it was simply called it: Das Haus mit der grünen Tür (‘The House with the Green Door’, which, interestingly, was my working title for the book, although I never told anyone about that. How did they know?!)

The book was an experiment. I wanted to move the traditional private eye novel from America to Norway, while taking account of the differences between the US of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and Norway in the 1970s. So Varg Veum was without doubt a close relative of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer; but he was transformed into a Scandinavian, left-wing social democrat, with whom many of my readers at the time could sympathise. He had a different type of background too: he was originally a social worker, employed by the local authority to help children who were in difficult situations or came from families where their parents were not able to take care of them.

My inspiration as a crime writer originally came from the Swedish couple, Sjöwall & Wahlöö, who, between 1965 and 1975, had a huge impact on international crime fiction with their ten novels about the Stockholm-based police inspector Martin Beck. My first two crime novels (and the fourth) were police procedurals in more or less the same style as Sjöwall & Wahlöö, with added inspiration coming from the American writer Chester Himes and his books about Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. In the back of my head, however, there was also the traditional plotting I’d learnt by reading Agatha Christie, Quentin Patrick, Erle Stanley Gardner and many other great plot constructors. And I had, of course, read Arthur Conan Doyle and been fascinated by the combination of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson since I first read The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was twelve years old.

However, it was only when I read Raymond Chandler for the first time, in 1971, that I really understood what good literature a crime novel could be. At that time I had published two experimental novels that were more inspired by Jack Kerouac than by crime writers, but I could see the similarities between Kerouac and Chandler, particularly the poetic and playful language. This made me think: Perhaps – some day – a crime novel? After having more or less failed (I have to admit) as a mainstream, ‘serious’ novelist, I then started my career as a crime writer in 1975, with the first of my police procedurals, and in 1977 the first Varg Veum novel.

I have to admit that I was sceptical about the experiment myself: was it possible to transfer this American style of crime writing to Norway in the 70s? But no critic protested that you couldn’t set a private detective story in contemporary Bergen, and the readers loved it. Having finished my third and last police procedural, in 1979, I then wrote number two in what was now going to be the Varg Veum series: Yours until Death. This book is available in English.

In June 2017, my seventeenth novel in the series, Wolves in the Dark, is published in the UK and will be available as an ebook all over the world. During the forty years between the first book and this, Varg has aged only twenty-five years. (The action in this book takes place in 2002, when he is almost sixty.) But he is still has the same roots: shooting off one-liners like a stressed Philip Marlowe, and solving mysteries like a sad and disturbed Lew Archer. In this book Varg deals with one of the most difficult cases of his career: he is on the run from the police himself, at the same time as trying to find out who is seeking revenge on him, and why? The combination of these ‘who’ and ‘why’ questions forms the basis for most modern crime novels. But it is the ‘why’ that is perhaps even more important now than in the earlier periods of the genre; and this is certainly the case in Wolves in the Dark. 

The book also deals with a couple of big themes: the problem of hacking into private computers; and – more tragically – the abuse of children carried out by international groups; a problem that has been demonstrated by a big investigation being conducted by the police in Bergen right now, as I write these words.

It seems that the stuff crime novels are made of never goes away.

Call For Papers - Worlding Crime Fiction: From the National to the Global

CFP: ACLA conference (Utrecht, 6-9 July 2017)

http://www.acla.org/worlding-crime-fiction-national-global

Since Raymond Chandler published the “Simple Art of Murder” (1944), a distinction has been made between the worldliness of the American hardboiled tradition (“It’s not a very fragrant world, but it’s the world you live in,” Chandler said of Hammett’s fiction) and the artificial, unrealistic and detached “Cheesecake Manor” of the classic detective novel. Moreover, there is a tendency in crime fiction studies to distinguish between the Anglo-American practice of crime writing and specific national crime traditions, the study of which has focused on how national crime fiction texts differ from the universalising Anglo-American norm. Both these distinctions have traditionally resulted in nation-centric readings of the genre as it has developed in specific countries and cultures.

This seminar seeks to further develop our understanding of this global genre that began with “Crime Fiction as World Literature” (ACLA 2015) and “Translating Crime: Production, Transformation and Reception” (ACLA 2016). To this end, we invite contributions that attempt to “world” the crime genre (Kadir 2004), to explore the genre’s worldliness within, but also beyond, specific national traditions.

The seminar explores three main ideas:

1)   The “presence of the world within the nation” (Damrosch 2015) – the ways in which seemingly nationally-bounded novels engage with the world beyond the nation in which they originate

2)   Worlding classic detective fiction – to what degree is Chandler’s reading accurate? Does it hold when this sub-genre is taken up by authors writing outside the British-American norm, either in languages other than English or writers from peripheral English (Australia, Canada, Ghana, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.) contexts.

3)   The relationship between readers and international texts. How do readers experience the world of crime fiction when reading from afar? How important is “the locus where the fixed foot of the compass that describes the globalizing circumscription is placed” (Kadir 2)? In what ways does a global consciousness emerge through the interaction between readers and international texts? Is the location of the reader as important as the origin of the text?

Potential participants are encouraged to contact the organisers before submitting abstracts through the ACLA portal.

Seminar Organisers: 

Stewart King, Monash University: stewart.king@monash.edu

Jesper Gulddal, University of Newcastle: jesper.gulddal@newcastle.edu.au

Alistair Rolls, University of Newcastle: alistair.rolls@newcastle.edu.au

Deadline for abstracts is 11:59 PM Pacific Time on 23rd September.

Raymond Chandler, George and Sonia Orwell

Over on The Orwell Society website there is an interesting article by L(ee) J Hurst on Raymond Chandler, George and Sonia Orwell. A brief snippet can be read below.

“I’m an English Public School man myself and knew these birds inside out. And the only kind of Public School man who could make a real detective would be the Public School man in revolt, like George Orwell" Chandler wrote in a letter in October 1951.

When Chandler came to Britain he reported "Sonia somebody [Orwell] … said that I was the darling of the British intellectuals and all the poets raved about me and that Edith Sitwell sat up in bed (probably looking like Henry IV^th, Part 3) and read my stuff with passion."

The rest of the article can be read on The Orwell Society website.