“I hope the day will come when I don’t have to ride around on [Dashiell] Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James [M.] Cain--faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things but because they do it in a dirty way.”
-- Raymond Chandler to his publisher, 1943
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
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1 comment:
After all the liking and niceing and high-fiving, all the bogus compliments being paid, all the transparently self-serving mutual admiration being served up in the current online marketing moment, it's refreshing to see someone take his pipe out of his mouth and, yes, tell us what he really thinks.
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