First edition

232 pages

Each copy numbered and signed

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    Send your sterling cheque, payable to Derek Robinson, to me at:
    Shapland House, Somerset Street, Bristol  BS2 8LZ, England - and of course I'll need your address. 

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Readers Write #23 April 2012  

A curtain-call for extras,

             gunplay in the bathroom,

The folk-singer Fred Wedlock, now alas no longer with us, once told me the secret of how to create a statue of a horse.   "Get a big block of stone," he said, "and hack off everything that doesn't look like horse."  There are days when writing feels like making that statue, except that the chisel is blunt and the mallet has a handle made of rubber.

 That's when I reach for my omnibus edition of Raymond Chandler's novels, partly for the pleasure of seeing a champion in action, partly to remind myself that he had his bad days too, and partly to remember that what matters (especially in a crime story) are the extras, the minor characters whom Chandler crafted so beautifully.  In The Lady in the Lake, he has a scene where his private eye Philip Marlowe visits the Graysons, a retired couple who can probably provide some information.  Chandler wrote:

      'Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye. He wore bifocals and had been gnawing fretfully at the evening paper.'

Chandler could have cut all that, and more like it, and got on with the plot, but the book would have been all the poorer.  There's a good reason why Chandler is still in print, 53 years after his death. It's not for his plots. It's for his extras, his telling details about people and places in Los Angeles in the 1940s. When Marlowe leaves the Graysons, he takes the elevator, 'carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.'  Those last five words alone are worth the price of the book, and many other books. 

There is another link. It goes back to long ago, when Hamish Hamilton was publishing The Eldorado Network. By good fortune, Roger Machell was my editor   -   and Roger had also been Raymond Chandler's editor for his British editions. He told me that one day his phone rang and it was Chandler, calling from his home in La Jolla, California, and obviously very drunk. "I'm going to shoot myself," he said. Roger, thinking fast, said, "Don't do that, Raymond. Let's talk about it..." He heard two loud bangs. Then silence. Roger phoned the La Jolla police, they hurried over and found Chandler sound asleep in the bathtub, with two bullet-holes in the ceiling.

End of anecdote. But what interested me was that when Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye (and at last won huge critical acclaim), that story included a scene where a successful author, in a fit of boredom and depression, tries and fails to kill himself. Or maybe he doesn't really try, maybe he's just acting.  What's interesting is that Chandler wasted nothing.  Anything and everything he saw and heard got noticed and remembered, including his own misadventure with a gun in a bathroom. One day he might be able to use it. Every writer should have two mottoes.  One is: Trust nobody, check everything. The other is: Look and listen.  The book isn't about the author.  It's about the world he sees, even when (in my case) that's a world of 50 or 100 years ago.

Thanks to the Internet, I get echoes of what I write in emails from readers all over the globe.  Of course praise is encouraging. (There is no limit to the flattery an author can absorb.)  Bill, somewhere in the U.S., himself a novelist, spent 25-plus years in the American Air Force, mostly flying Phantoms, so his opinion carries weight when he says of my flying books: 'I can tell you that the fighter-pilot humor is right on target.'  He re-reads Goshawk Squadron and is now 'in the midst of Piece of Cake and laugh until I have tears rolling down my cheeks'. 

John in Japan, an old friend, writes: 'I have just come to the end of A Good Clean Fight in audiobook format. Bravo, is all I can say. I also listened to Hullo Russia, Goodbye England last year and thoroughly enjoyed that as well!'  (Much of the credit must go to the actors who made the readings, Michael Tudor Barnes and Nick McCardle, for their talented voices.)  And Derrick (I don't know where) 'just wanted to drop you a line to thank you for the pleasure your books have given me. I first read Goshawk Squadron as a boy nearly 40 years ago and have re-read it three more times since.'  Liam via Facebook 'cannot wait for the new book, A Splendid Little War, apparently due later this year.' (Publication is now planned for January 2013.)  He urges 'those of you not in the know' to 'get Piece of Cake, the greatest novel ever written'.  Another Facebook friend, John, 'just finished  Hornet's Sting. What a cracker!  I always had a soft spot for Paxton  - poor bugger. The development of his character from the first book  (War Story), and his relationship with O'Neill, was beautifully done. The end of Pax's story certainly shocked me.'

Then  -  surprise, surprise   -   a letter from Guy, a very old pal (we were at college together, back in the Middle Ages). Recovering from a rather nasty illness, he had time to re-read my flying stories   -   'Once again I was totally engrossed among the vivid characters. Their persuasive arguments and caustic banter make them so alive and such good company.'  Enter his wife, to give him a copy of my non-fiction book, Invasion. 1940, and he says 'to my astonishment I was so hooked by the reasoning that I finished the whole of it before returning to the interrupted novel.'  Well, I worked hard to make that slice of history as readable as any work of fiction, and I'm glad it paid off.  Guy spent his National Service on a Motor Torpedo Boat, dashing up and down the Channel, so he has personal knowledge of those hazardous waters.

I'm delighted to hear that Guy's gremlins have been zapped.  On the other hand, maybe the Luis Cabrillo quartet should have a health warning on the cover.  L.L in New York 'picked up Red Rag Blues, ran across Cabrillo, the Fantonis and Chick Scatola  (Mafiosi of varying competence) and began laughing so hard' that he ended up in hospital   -   although it's only fair to add that he was already suffering from a deep chest cold, so maybe Luis Cabrillo's con-artist doings simply hastened the doctor's decision. Anyway, I sent L.L. a copy of the sequel, Operation Bamboozle and he replied with thanks, saying: 'I look forward to reading BAMBOOZLE with a pacemaker handy.'    Both books were fun to write, and I'm glad they're fun to read. 

 Derek Robinson                   Previous Readers Write

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