Farewell, My Lovely,
Raymond Chandler
Hamish Hamilton,
310pp, £12.99
“It was a warm day, almost the end of March, and I stood outside the barber shop looking up at the jutting neon sign of a second-floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s. A man was looking up at the sign too. He was looking up at the dusky windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty . . .” If you’ve never entered the gimlet-eyed world of Chandler, do so now, as the major novels are reissued in the original Hamish Hamilton covers to commemorate 50 years since the author’s death. Farewell, My Lovely (1940) is a benchmark for the literary crime novel. A parade of the lovelorn and the criminal, of “smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin”, peoples the pages of this tale of American reinvention turned sour and bloody. Caught up in it all, naturally, is the kind-hearted schmuck and hard-headed private dick Philip Marlowe, Nemesis in a trench coat.
Joe Murphy
Ten Days that Changed the Nation: the Making of Modern Britain,
Stephen Pollard
Simon & Schuster, 243pp, £10.99
Stephen Pollard purports to offer an original approach to analysing postwar Britain. Where it was once the “great man” theory of history that distorted our study of the past, today it is our fixation with great events. Pollard aims to demonstrate how apparently insignificant days were of “fundamental importance to our nation’s development”. Germaine Greer, for example, is shown to have wielded an influence far beyond her own imagining: Pollard traces modern family breakdown to 24 October 1970, the day The Female Eunuch was published.
He is on surer ground when he discusses 15 June 1987, the day Prince Edward’s career as a television producer reached its nadir with It’s a Royal Knockout. However, a certain residual loyalty blinds him to the conclusion that a system based on hereditary rule will inevitably place mediocrities in positions of power.
Evelyn Waugh once complained that the Conservative Party had “never put the clock back by a single second”. After reading this jeremiad, it is hard to imagine that Pollard would not agree.
George Eaton
