Check it — a letter from Marcus!
I sent Marcus a note that included my lousy, lefty autograph and this reply:
Marcus!
Thanks for your letter. I’m so glad that you like my series, and The Great Sled Race in particular. It’s one of my favorites, too.
One of the things I try to do in each book I write, mostly just for myself, is to make a reference to a real book. It’s just a my way of connecting Jigsaw’s made-up world with the everyday world that you, the reader, live in. In this one, I decided that Ms. Gleason’s class would be reading Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner, which is a book that I greatly admire. She even introduces the idea of The Five “W” Questions essential to reading and writing: who, what, where, when, why. As Jigsaw realizes: “Reading was like detective work. Figure out the W questions . . . and you’ll catch the crook.”
By way of tribute, I lifted and transformed the setup of this story from Raymond Chandler’s great adult book, Farewell, My Lovely. The character of second-grader Bigs Maloney is partly inspired by a hulking ex-con named Moose Malloy. Remember that author’s name, Raymond Chandler, and you can catch up with his books in another 10 years or so.
Take care, be well, and keep reading books — any books at all!
James Preller
NOTE: Readers can click here to learn more background info about Jigsaw Jones #8: The Case of the Great Sled Race. I always hoped that a creative teacher might read Sled Race alongside Gardiner’s great book. They really do go together well.
Inspired by Postcards from Penguin, a card collection based on classic Penguin book covers, one couple created a massive wall hanging tribute to their favorite books.
The couple posted the entire project on Reddit’s DIY section. In the photo set embedded above, you can explore the entire project from start to finish. Here’s more from the post:
We’re both huge book lovers, so we immediately began thinking of ways to use them in an interesting, decorative way … We tried various layouts, eventually deciding that a shifting color scheme would be the most aesthetically pleasing. We cherry-picked some titles that we were particularly fond of. Among them: The Catcher in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Great Gatsby, and 1984. Among the authors: H.G. Wells, Roald Dahl, Raymond Chandler, and Graham Greene.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Novelist James Ellroy has published a $1.99 Byliner Fiction story about Fred Otash, a famous private detective and writer who made his reputation in Hollywood.
Follow this link to read an excerpt from “Shakedown,” Ellroy’s new story at Byliner Fiction. In the video embedded above, we interviewed Ellroy about his early writing career.
You can read the real-life Otash’s obituary at The Los Angeles Times: “Otash’s clients included entertainers Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn, Edward G. Robinson, Judy Garland, Lana Turner and Bette Davis, well-known lawyers such as F. Lee Bailey, Jerry Geisler and Melvin Belli, and both major political parties. Otash prowled Hollywood by night in a chauffeured Cadillac full of women he called ‘little sweeties,’ and much like a fictional private eye conjured up by Raymond Chandler, drank a quart of Scotch and smoked four packs of cigarettes a day.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
"Where do you get your ideas?" is still the question I get asked most as an author. The second-most-asked question is "How do you write a book?" The answer to both questions is simple: I don't know. But I can tell you how I do it. Writing, like any art form, is whatever you can [...]
Award winning novelist John Banville will write a new novel about Raymond Chandler‘s beloved private detective, Philip Marlowe. Henry Holt will publish the book in 2013 under Banville’s pen name, Benjamin Black.
Banville promises to create a “slightly surreal, or hyper-real, atmosphere” for the novel, exploring some of Marlowe’s Los Angeles. What do you think of this surprising turn for the novelist?
Here’s more about the title: “Along with Marlowe, Banville will bring back policeman Bernie Olds, the gumshoe’s good friend. The book will have an original plot and take place in the 1940s. The setting will remain in Bay City – Chandler’s fictional stand-in for Santa Monica, California – and feature Chandler’s hallmark noir ambience.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
My contribution to the “Why’s This So Good?” series — a collaboration between Longreads, Alexis Madrigal, and Nieman Storyboard’s Andrea Pitzer designed to explore “what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading” — is about Raymond Chandler’s 1945 “Writers in Hollywood,” a scathing attack on the motion picture industry.
Candler “brought to bear on his subject all the fury and surprising insights of the novelist who wrote ‘The Big Sleep,’ the gimlet-eyed practicality of the storyteller whose first publications were for pulp magazines, and the staggering self-absorption of the depressive alcoholic.” And the critique isn’t just a dusty object of curiosity from the vaults; it’s relevant now.
In the heyday of the Hollywood novelist-screenwriter, a slew of literary talents – Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and Aldous Huxley, to name just a few – did time writing film scripts because they were easy money. Now, in the new narrative TV landscape, it’s cable companies that are signing novelists and memoirists in droves. Jonathan Ames, Jennifer Egan, Sam Lipsyte, Sloane Crosley, Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are just a few recent hires. Given that fiction writers like Richard Price and George Pelacanos helped shape “The Wire,” arguably the most interesting story of our time, the focus on novelists makes a certain amount of sense. But how much creative control will they have? And will cable TV, too, eventually become too rigid to allow innovation?
You can read the rest, along with prior installments from Alexis Madrigal, Radhika Jones, Carl Zimmer, and Chris Jones, over at the Nieman Storyboard site.
Previously Ten novels and short stories that would make good movies (at IFC) and notes following The Wire season 5 premiere.
By way of tribute, I lifted and transformed the setup of this story from Raymond Chandler’s great adult book, Farewell, My Lovely. The character of second-grader Bigs Maloney is partly inspired by a hulking ex-con named Moose Malloy. Remember that author’s name, Raymond Chandler, and you can catch up with his books in another 10 years or so.
