Noir Classics

[Carvill, John]

> D Morris:

> Lew is an example of one of AtD's flaws:  It was filled with secondary
characters who
> added little but distraction from whatever my have been the main point
of this novel.

Again, I take your point. (What is *happening* to me?) But again, I
could counter that Lew was an example of one of ATD's strengths. Would
it be wildly off-base to compare him, significance-wise, to Pointsman in
GR? They both are immediately memorable characters, both come back in at
the end of their respective books, etc.

Either way, Lew was one of my favourite characters, one of my most
cherished aspects of the book. And lets face it, it'll probably be years
yet before anyone 'knows' how ATD fits together. I remain convinced that
there's a hidden structure in there that none of us has seen more than
hints of, something to do with mathematics, railways, the number 4, etc.


Changing subject totally (but too lazy to find the appropriate thread),
let me just, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, step out of some intellectual
closet here and admit that I have never read Proust. Always meant to.
What's the best edition of 'In Remembrance'? I notice there's no Penguin
edition here in the UK. There, got that off my chest. Wasn't so hard,
now, was it? A-and, waitaminute now, there *is* a connection after all:

She wore brownish speckled tweeds, a mannish shirt and tie, hand-carved
walking shoes. Her stockings were just as sheer as the day before, but
she wasn't showing as much of her legs. Her black hair was glossy under
a brown Robin Hood hat that might have cost as much as fifty dollars and
looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter.

"Well, you do get up," she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red
settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed
laundering and the boy's size library table with the venerable magazines
on it to give the place a professional touch. "I was beginning to think
perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust."

"Who's he?" I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked
a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could
function under a strain. "A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates.
You wouldn't know him."

"Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir."

- Raymond Chandler, 'The Big Sleep'