Raymond chandler

Saturday

Bill Kauffman

An LA adventure

For years I have read the likes of Raymond Chandler and John Fante and rewatched Chinatown in preparation for our occasional sojourns to Los Angeles (my wife is a native Angelena), but after the stupefaction induced by our last trip, I chose Charles Bukowski, the flophouse poet of hangovers, for our first post-Covid invasion. “Los Angeles is a Cross, and we all hang here, stupid little Christs,” wrote Bukowski in a 1967 letter. That line seems off to me, self-consciously poète maudit, but I always cut poets of place a break.

Los Angeles

Monday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The prophetic Raymond Chandler

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Laramie, Wyoming In an age of extreme individualism complicated by racial sensitivity and class resentment, ancestry is an uncomfortable subject. But it remains a fact that a man’s ancestors are never irrelevant to who and what he is, though of course they determine neither. Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) said that he was conceived here in Laramie, before being delivered in Chicago following the usual interval of nine months. His American father deserted the family and his Anglo-Irish mother took her son to England, to be educated at Dulwich College.

raymond chandler