Wigtown Spring Book Weekend
2–4 May

Covenanters & women crime writers will be two of the themes woven into this year’s Wigtown Spring Book Weekend. With dozens of events from author talks to guided walks, writing, photography & music workshops, the programme is now available online:

https://www.wigtownbookfestival.com/blog/wigtown-spring-book-weekend-2026

#Scottish #literature #books #bookfestivals #historicalfiction #crimefiction #womenwriters #Wigtown

#MurderEveryMonday Crime fiction title with an evaluative adjective

When Kate reminded us of this week’s #MurderEveryMonday theme, my first thought was for H. R. F. Keating because I had noticed a pattern in some of his books:

• The Bad Detective
• The Good Detective
• The Soft Detective
• The Rich Detective

These are standalone’s and I never read anything by Keating, but I’m curious about his writing. He was president of the Detection Club between 1985 and 2000. I do have two related books in my immediate TBR: Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime, essays edited by him, and The Verdict of Us All – edited by Peter Lovesey, a collection of short stories by The Detection Club’s members in honour of Keating’s 80th birthday, which include before each work a memory or contact these writers had of H.R.F. Keating.

Raymond Chandler’s cannibalized stories. On the blog:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/04/20/raymond-chandlers-cannibalized-stories/

#writing #CrimeFiction #RaymondChandler #ShortStories #books #literature #blog

Raymond Chandler’s cannibalized stories

If I were asked to name my all-time favourite crime-fiction writer, I would struggle to place anyone above Raymond Chandler. In contemporary literature the one who comes closest is Peter Temple, who, like Chandler, took up the practice in middle age. There’s a lot to be said for it.

A late entrant to the fiction-writing game, Chandler completed seven novels in his lifetime; another one was finished posthumously. For readers it’s a very manageable total. I read the novels in my twenties and reread a few in my thirties.

I was less systematic with Chandler’s shorter work, with the result that I recently picked up an unread – and unusual – collection, Killer in the Rain, first published in 1964. Philip Durham, who was a professor of American literature at University of California, introduces this Penguin edition:

During his lifetime Raymond Chandler published twenty-three short stories. Yet of this relatively small output only fifteen are generally known to the reading public. For a quarter of a century the remaining eight have lain buried in the crumbling pages of old pulp magazines. And these eight stories are among his finest.

Killer in the Rain collects those eight stories. Curiously, though I had never read them before, I had what I described elsewhere (Mastodon; Bluesky) as a recurring experience of déjà lu: half-familiar lines, characters, and scenarios.

It turns out that Chandler ‘cannibalized’ these eight stories for his novels – he once said in a letter that he ‘won’t discard anything’ – and for that reason excluded them from collections published during his lifetime. This textual cannibalization has its own short paragraph on Wikipedia.

Repurposing one’s writing is a common practice. But it made Chandler uneasy, Durham writes, and he was able to justify it ‘only by leaving such stories buried, virtually unknown in the pages of the rapidly disappearing pulp magazines’. I also feel that it’s trickier in fiction than nonfiction. Durham again:

Turning short stories into cohesive novels tested the extent of Chandler’s skill. It meant combining and enlarging plots, maintaining a thematic consistency, blowing up scenes, and adapting, fusing, and adding characters.

Primary among the characters, of course, was Philip Marlowe, one of the great fictional detectives. For this creation Chandler drew on earlier protagonists, Killer in the Rain making visible the progression from a nameless first-person narrator to Carmady, John Dalmas, and John Evans.

Things were more complicated for secondary figures:

Of the twenty-one characters in The Big Sleep, seven were drawn directly from ‘The Curtain’, six were taken from ‘Killer in the Rain’, four were composites from the two stories, and four were new creations.

Perhaps most interestingly, at least from this editor’s point of view, is the expansion of entire scenes. One passage in ‘The Curtain’, set in a greenhouse, is about 1,100 words; in The Big Sleep it’s about 2,500. Durham presents the change in miniature, from the following forty-two words:

The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the glass house dripped. In the halflight enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.

to these eighty-two:

The air was thick, wet, steamy, and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish colour, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

He finds both passages ‘intense and vivid’ and notes how each achieves its effect: the first through terseness, the second through mood, hyperbole, and ‘striking similes’. Chandler assembled Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake in similar fashion, with variations and twists on the original material.

After Chandler’s death in 1959, frequent calls for the publication of these ‘lost’ stories led eventually to Killer in the Rain, with Durham concluding that ‘there no longer seems any good reason why, provided their origin is clearly explained, they should be denied to the many thousands of Chandler’s readers’.

As well as being thoroughly enjoyable in their own right, the stories can be appreciated as raw material and inspiration for the better-known novels, and they offer a nice insight into an artful form of literary transmutation.

*

An etymological note on cannibalize: The OED dates it to 1655, in the sense ‘To overwhelm, destroy, or eat away at, as if by cannibalism; to crush or manipulate (a person)’. The more literal sense came along two centuries later.

The figurative sense ‘To absorb or destroy (something of a similar kind)’, used especially in business contexts, emerged in 1920; not until World War II do we finally see the word as used in the current post, defined as:

To use (something) as a source of parts or content for another of a similar kind; to take (a part) from one thing to use in another.

The first item the OED records as being thus ‘cannibalized’ is a wrecked French plane (‘parts are stripped from it for use on damaged Allied ships’ —Stars & Stripes, London edition, 26 Nov. 1942, caption). Cannibal itself is borrowed from Latin canibales and Spanish caníbal.

If you're an aficionado of mystery novels or Japanese fiction, you probably know about Yokomizo Seisho. I'm not, so I didn't, but I enjoyed his first novel 'The Honjin Murders' (1946) enormously.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/ca6360f3-71d0-40ce-8222-e9face17c4a4

#crimefiction #mystery #yokomizoseisho #thehonjinmurders #books #bookstodon

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The electrifying moment: Peter Temple on writing

Ask me to name my favourite writer in a given genre – science fiction, thriller, horror – and I would usually struggle to whittle it down beyond a shifting shortlist. But ask me my favourite contemporary crime writer, and I settle readily on the name Peter Temple (1946–2018).

Why Temple? There’s his style and language, stripped down and surprising; his pitch-perfect dialogue that puts you right into his world; his dark wit and playful metaphors, so satisfying to my Irish tastes; his gloomy, uncompromising stories, with their shards of love and beauty.

I discovered him late, years after his last novel was published in 2009. But he started late (his debut was published when he was almost 50 years old), and he completed nine. So it didn’t take me long to catch up, though I spaced them out to postpone the day when I’d have no more to discover.*

In his posthumous collection The Red Hand: Stories, Reflections and the Last Appearance of Jack Irish (Irish is the protagonist of four Temple novels, an unfinished one, and an adapted TV series), Temple describes his unlikely late blossoming with a mix of self-deprecation and alienation:

I never had the feeling of having a career. I was just waiting for my vocation to announce itself. And one day I began writing and it did.

It’s not that writing comes easily to me. Being stuck is the rule, not the exception. In fact, for me writing is one long attempt to become unstuck. I move from one impasse to another. Most of the time, I am convinced that the whole enterprise is a mistake and doomed.

This kind of anxiety would be acceptable if I believed I was creating art, but I don’t, and that knowledge serves to make matters worse. An ordinary sentence, like an ordinary piece of joinery, isn’t dignified by the time it took to make.

The simile is deliberate: woodwork is a recurring activity in several of Temple’s books, and I suspect he practised it himself at least sometime in his life.

His muse is elusive and fleeting:

I’ve also found that inspiration isn’t something that lasts beyond a paragraph or two. Creative rushes are also to be distrusted. It’s the passages that flowed from your fingertips that you have to axe the next day.

The ideas I have for books are also much too vague and ephemeral to be called inspirations. For me, they take the form of images and the feelings that come with them, scenes seen and imagined, usually unconnected, isolated, not part of any narrative. I’ve usually forgotten them by chapter three.

Before leaving his native South Africa for Australia in 1979 and turning his hand to crime fiction, Temple worked in journalism and academia. I detect in his prose some of the former but little of the latter, except perhaps the struggle with structure:

I must confess to hating plotting. I like travelling without a map, falling into holes, straying down dark alleys into cul-de-sacs, waiting for the electrifying moment when the story wants to tell itself to me, when characters turn their faces to me and speak.

When they do speak, his ear is ready:

Another important thing that happened to me was a friend’s mother introducing me to reading plays. If I have any ability to write dialogue, it comes from reading at least thirty volumes of Best American Short Plays. This worthy annual introduced me to Tennessee Williams, Albee, Odets, Miller, Mamet, Wilder. I still love reading plays and revere no writer more than the British minimalist Harold Pinter.

He not only appreciated but applied that minimalism. His books are not slim but their stories are elliptical, requiring more investment than most, and perhaps more perseverance, depending on your tastes. After Truth won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2010, Temple said in his address:

To the dismay of my publishers and many readers I have been concerned to put language under pressure. To compress it into little bits that cease to squeak and then to put back in only so many words as are needed to restore meaning. My defence in this is that I have been encouraged by my adopted country’s ingrained habits of expression. Of saying as little as possible in dealing with one another.

That style also manifests in the popular Australian practice of clipped words (like bikie, relly, servo, tradie, and ute), which Temple used in his novels. The Red Hand includes a 10-page glossary (‘Tradies Wear Sunnies and Blunnies’) written for American publishers.

One last excerpt from the collection, quoting his Miles Franklin talk:

There are only a few stories available to us. But there are countless variations. Stories are valuable only and in proportion to the gifts that the storyteller brings to them.  I don’t know if I have any gifts. I can only say that I’ve loved words. They haven’t loved me back but I’ve tried to do justice to the language and to its infinite malleability. But my God, I have tested that malleability in my time.

If you haven’t read Peter Temple and want a flavour of his fiction, this thread on Twitter contains a scattering of lines from his books, such as the Chandleresque ‘He eyed me like a dog show judge‘ and ‘His face was mostly nose, spread over it like a frog.‘

I’ve also featured a couple of Temple’s novels in book spine poems: Truth in ‘Useless Crazy Heart‘, and The Broken Shore in ‘A Quiet Life‘.

*

* Filmmaker John Waters, in his memoir Role Models, confessed to leaving unread one book by his beloved Ivy Compton-Burnett:

Her last spoken words before death? “Leave me alone.” I have to. I have all twenty of her novels and I’ve read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself.

Nice review from Literary Los Angeles for "Chandler & West: A Story of Los Angeles"

"By bringing together two writers whose own work helped define the mythic and cynical visions of the city, Nelson constructs a fictional origin story for L.A. noir itself—one where the boundaries between art, crime and Hollywood spectacle blur into a single narrative about the city’s enduring allure and moral ambiguity.”

https://j-nelson.net/chandler-and-west-a-story-of-los-angeles/

#Books #Fiction #HistoricalFiction #CrimeFiction #Book #Mystery