MattRees.net

Raymond Chandler wrote that a writer shouldn’t read letters until lunchtime. The energy that ought to go into his novel would be diverted to correspondence. If email had been invented 50 years earlier, we might never have had “The Big Sleep.” Email has an itching urgency that letters don’t have. And a letter leads only [...]

Writing of the disdain expressed for genre novels by critics, Raymond Chandler said that there were just as many bad “literary novels” of the type favored by critics as there were bad genre stories – except that the bad literary novels didn’t get published. In other words, there’s nothing inherent in so-called genre fiction that [...]