Week Fifty-Three - Jeanette

 Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot (1909-1962)

Recommended by Jude

People spend years studying the poetry of T.S. Eliot. They don’t usually chuck it into their brain at Victoria Coach Station.

I did not even have a week in which to read this. The combination of adding an extra book to Two Readers and the cumulative effect of the occasional late post left me with eight books in December. But, 2013, throw all the shit you want at me (as I just wrote, today it’s a malfunctioning laptop power pack, meaning I’m racing to do this standing up in Hillsborough's Wetherspoons as the battery life ticks down and new year revellers start piling in) but, fuck you, I’m finishing Two Readers on time.

I want my world to end with a bang, not a whimper.

Jude writes, in her dedication at the front of my copy of Collected Poems 1909-1962, that Eliot’s poetry ‘made me realise the real magic of the English language.’ Perhaps, then, it’s not such a bad thing that circumstance has forced me to pelt through it. I’m reacting in a very primal way, thinking of the way the words dance on the page, feeling the direct relevance that the poems brought to my world.

            We shall not cease from exploration.

                        (‘Little Gidding’)

I saw Jude last night – the wonderful Jude. We were with others, so we didn’t get too long to reflect on the project, but I will tell her now that Two Readers has been one of the most satisfying creative experiences of my life. Even though Jude’s posts weren’t regular, they were brilliant and inspiring, and the credit for turning my idea for book recommendations from friends into a blog entirely lies with her. That’s what true friendship does: one of you has an idea, the other has an idea, you do something amazing together. Iron sharpens iron. I have felt her hands on my back, supporting me, in so many precious ways this year.

            What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

            Out of this stony rubbish?

                        (‘The Waste Land’)

‘The Waste Land’ came into Jude’s life when she was in sixth form, which provides a curious parallel with the book I recommended for her. We’ve often talked of what made us want to write, and what made us writers (two different things). That era, age sixteen-to-eighteen, is perhaps the key one of my life, and I know she feels similarly.

            The tiger springs in the new year.

            Us he devours.

                        (‘Gerontion’)

Jude and I have each had a very difficult 2013, for different reasons. But through it we have been there for one another. Writing about the people very very closest to me, of whom Jude is one, is not easy. Because there is so much to say about someone I love so very much. So perhaps less is more.

            Both intimate and unidentifiable.

                        (‘Little Gidding’)

Just as there’s so much to say about these bloody incredible poems. (And so little time to say it.)

The first of my favourites is ‘The Hollow Men’. I knew I’d love it just from the Heart Of Darkness epigraph. And then this comes…

            Between the idea

            And the reality

            Between the motion

            And the act

            Falls the shadow

                        (‘The Hollow Men’)

That’s exactly how I’ve felt this year. I’ve felt shadows in my mind, on my heart, in my creative process, coming between thought and result. How can one fight a shadow? I’ve tried. And I am hard on myself when I fail. But Eliot's words buoyed me, they swaddled me, they told me that I didn't need to hate my failure quite as much as I do.

Many of the poems have a strong religious element. There’s clearly a schooled element to Eliot’s Christian history, but there's also playfulness. Take ‘The Hippopotamus’. Its opening lines relate to how huge the animal is, but that it is ‘merely flesh and blood’ compared to the True Church. The poem vacillates between a seemingly genuine devotional fervour and a ludicrous piss-take, particularly with Eliot's glorious image of the hippo ‘performing on a harp of gold’.

For Eliot does have quite the sense of humour, and he sometimes tries to ‘help’ the reader with notes and references, particularly in ‘The Waste Land’.

I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.

                        (‘Notes on The Waste Land’)

Cheers, Thomas Stearns.

But what of ‘The Waste Land’ itself? It is astonishing. Imagine everything in English literature from Sir Gawain And The Green Knight to Lily Allen. I am simply overwhelmed. The word awesome is so overused, but with reference to 'The Waste Land', I mean it in its original I-am-struck-with-awe sense. Written in 1922, my initial impression is that its some sweep of post-Great War British culture, putting it in the context of the long Christian epoch of the country: of how societies fracture and repair, how traditions break and form. I also loved the references to Dante's Divine Comedy, my only other poetry foray this year. I haven't had the time to research anything of Eliot or his literary intentions, but I have learned from the book jacket that he was an American who settled in the UK in 1915. Perhaps that completely scuppers my theory, but perhaps not: the eyes of the new sometimes open wider, and cry fresher tears.

Since ‘The Waste Land’ is so impossible to sum up, perhaps I should just leave it there before I embarrass myself, and conclude with mentioning my other favourite poem, ‘East Coker’, part of Four Quarters.

            As we grow older

            The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.

                        (‘East Coker’)

This long poem feels like a very personal reflection, a song of experience, one which lights the bonds of humanity. Those ties that transcend the spoken and pull us on to the new. I expect that’s why it has hit me so very hard on this, the old year’s night. I have read fifty-three books and I have loved fifty-three people. I'll never do it again. But I'll never forget it.

            In my end is my beginning.

                          ('East Coker')

Week Fifty - Jeanette

 The Pursuit Of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945)

Recommended by Katherine

When I moved into my present flat (helped by Katherine, as well as Sharron, Nik, Tim, Kathryn, Rupert and the still-to-come Anita) I didn’t have much furniture. What I need, I said to Katherine, is not really a bed or a table. It’s a lovely vintage writing bureau.

‘I’ve got one of those in my garage,’ she said. ‘You can have it if you want.’

Since that beauty took up residence in the corner of my lounge, I cannot imagine life without it. Not having separate sections for creamy high gsm envelopes and the pound-shop jobbies for sending off the council tax? Pure savagery. (That sounds sarcastic if you don’t know me, but if you do, you’ll know how absolutely in earnest I am.) But, more importantly than even the correct ordering of stationery, I cannot imagine life without Katherine as my friend.

Last time I saw her, for a Christmas drink, our natter flitted between the effect of topography upon memory and the pantos we have known and ‘loved’; literary stylings and how Jem and the Holograms dolls were overpriced compared to Sindys. (Plus her husband comes from Norfolk. She’s as wry about the place as I am.)

Katherine is only a bloody qualified librarian, too! That’s the Red Rum (winning horse not backwards prophecy) of literary suggestion, right there. That’s why I wasn’t worried when I picked up The Pursuit Of Love and it had a hot-pink, Sophie Kinsella reader-friendly cover and praise from the Daily Mail on the back. I also wasn’t worried because I knew that Nancy Mitford was big mates with one of my revelations of the year: the prickly prince EvelynWaugh. And I certainly wasn’t worried when I started reading her cut-glass prose.

Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us children.

The children include our narrator, Fanny, and her cousin (the book’s protagonist) Linda. A dramatic youngster, Linda attempted suicide by yew-berry at the age of ten (because of a dead dog). They both love Oscar Wilde and long for adulthood, because they presume it will be all social whirls and Grand Love.

While Fanny quickly gives up on the latter and settles for the up-down-four-square Alfred, Linda keeps her idealism and it, naturally, leads her to missteps. Seventy years ago, people generally married these missteps. First up for Linda is the Conservative MP, Tony Kroesig, son of the Governor of the Bank of England. I found the characterisation of the Kroesig family brilliant but extremely depressing, because it is exactly analogous to the Tory attitude of today.

The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial qualities, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him as a rotter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral.

It doesn’t work out with Tony.

Next, Linda throws herself into marriage with a Communist, Christian. His bad points are of a different hue.

‘I’m always saying to Christian how much I wish his buddies would either brighten up their parties a bit or else stop giving them, because I don’t see the point of sad parties, do you? And left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.’

It doesn’t work out with Christian.

Linda’s refusal to settle leads to Paris and to a man named Fabrice (‘she was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love’); but, for some of her social circle, her swelling heart doesn’t matter. She should have stuck with Tony or, at a push, Christian. She’s judged as superficial, reckless and selfish, quick to bugger off at the first sign of trouble to look for a pipe dream. Yet, the reader is led to a far kinder conclusion. Linda is pursuing love, and second best is never enough: you’ll do much better, baby, on your own.

Since we’re quoting Madonna, I re-watched Who’s That Girl lately, and it popped into my head while reading The Pursuit Of Love.

Now, I’m making no claims for its cinematic qualities (it’s quite crap). I bring it up as a point of comparison that’s easy to forget when you largely live in a literary fiction and arty movie bubble. At the end of Who's That Girl, Griffin Dunne jilts his dullard fiancée for the unconventional Madge, which is a textbook example of a standard and extremely common dramatic device. From the breezy chimes of Busted’s ‘Crashed The Wedding’ to the more textured The Graduate, those who pursue love (especially by taking drastic action) are treated in one way and one way only. They are rewarded. In real life, they’re generally not. For a start, we usually take the hint that we’re not wanted when our darling gets married to someone else. In popular fiction, the heroes and heroines are so thick-skinned that they see the nuptials simply as another hurdle to leap, and no-one will be upset, or angry that the thousands spunked on a wedding is wasted.

What I really liked about The Pursuit Of Love was that, even while it uses some of the expected structure of romantic comedy, there’s a strong discomfort about happy-ever-after. For when Linda does find love with Fabrice, she is put off by his apparent commitment to someone else (a dead woman: how can anyone compete with that?). It is not at all clear that when Linda finally has her strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness that it will result in anything like a conventional relationship, or even a relationship at all. In this way, it is very similar to the other major work I’ve read on l’amour this year, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time Of Cholera. Unlike ...Cholera, though, The Pursuit Of Love’s épée to cut through love’s cliché is not philosophical intensity but sharp wit and brutal social observation. It has a light comedic touch and firm location in a contemporary setting.

I think I said all I wanted to say about love in relation to the Marquez work. When I wrote that – my favourite post of the year – I was in the eye of a perfect storm, and that book was my lightning rod. Now it’s Christmas Eve, I have three books left of Two Readers, and a real storm is raging outside, pulling trees from their roots and causing brick walls to tumble down.

            ‘He was the great love of her life, you know.’

            ‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother, sadly. ‘One always thinks that. Every, every time.’

Week Forty-Eight - Jeanette

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941)

Recommended by Tim

Tim came round for dinner on Saturday. As the last time we’d see each other before 2013 shut its eyes, our shared mood was reflective. I was taking stock of Two Readers, and talking of my impression of Between The Acts.

I thought Between The Acts would be one of the more challenging recommendations. I had read To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, and retained no great affection for either. I did admire Virginia Woolf’s stylistic ambition, but the books themselves were fairly unloveable: similar to my thoughts on Joan Didion, you can appreciate writing for the achievement it is without ever wishing to read the fucker again.

In our Saturday conflab, Tim described Woolf’s non-page turner Mrs Dalloway succinctly as ‘all people preparing for dinner parties.’ Still, and certainly as one of my best-read friends, Tim felt he needed to persist with Virginia Woolf. He felt uncomfortable with dismissing an important novelist as only concerned with the bourgeouisie arranging flowers. And it was, with Between The Acts – Woolf’s final novel before her suicide – where he found satisfaction. This was the first reason for his recommendation.

In a note that precedes the text, Leonard Woolf (her husband) writes that Between The Acts was a complete novel, but Woolf had not ‘finally revised [it] for the printer’ before her death. I wonder if this was a reason why Tim, and I, reacted better to this novel. Perhaps, because there wasn’t that last opportunity to ruthlessly weed out what she considered sentimental, Between The Acts is a warmer book. It wasn’t half as much of a slog as I feared.

At that, the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped, retrieving walking-sticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised themselves and turned about, the music modulated. The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we.

Concerning a play (actually, calling it a ‘play’ dignifies it: it’s more of an am-dram dickabout), Between The Acts’ most obvious theme is performance, and especially the relationship between an audience and the action in front of it.

‘Reality too strong’, she muttered. ‘Curse ‘em!’ She felt everything they felt. Audiences were the devil. O to write a play without an audience – the play.

Tim knows acting fascinates me (and that’s the second reason he recommended this book). This isn’t because I want to act myself, but rather because I’m intrigued by how acting translates into everyday life. If you can convince people that you feel emotions as part of a constructed performance, what’s to stop you using those skills in real life? Manufacturing deceit, onstage and off, is a longstanding interest of mine.

              We all act. Yes, but whose play?

The play in Between The Acts is written and directed by failed actor and ‘lady of wonderful energy’ Miss La Trobe. It is an annual event, almost a ritual, and the community comes together to watch and participate in the pageant. Rather than create a coherent work of fiction, La Trobe’s work is an anthology, stopping at different eras of British history. She creates not individual characters, but the nebulous and shifting character of national identity. Thus, it is less like (e.g.) a well-crafted Ibsen psychological drama and more like a Mummers’ play.

What Mummers’ plays and Miss La Trobe’s pageant (and, perhaps, Woolf’s novels) have in common is that they’re not that interested in dramatic tension. Each looks at archetypes (folk and mythological characters, representations from British historical periods, the contemporary mannered upper-middle classes) and reproduces them. The audience has a prior knowledge of what to expect. The drama instead comes from random factors: will it rain, who’s gossiping about whom in the audience, will the cows’ lowing drown out the dialogue. What happens, indeed, between the acts.

Miss La Trobe’s play is performed a mere few weeks before the outbreak of World War II. Woolf obviously knew that, soon, all existing community rituals would be shattered, replaced by the new ones of blackouts and air-raids. But, still, in 1941 the full horror of Nazism was yet to come: the Final Solution had not been implemented, with the first industrial extermination taking place at Auschwitz in September 1941, six months after Woolf's death. She could not know how fully even humanity itself would be torn apart. Still, it is said that the horror of the war (and her house being bombed in the Blitz) contributed to the re-emergence of her depression and her decision to drown herself.

Although it’s tempting with a carefully constructed book like this to get all lit-crit on yo' ass and disappear in a cloud of signifiers and discourse (read the introduction for an ample example of that), it seems equally possible to enjoy it as a storytelling snapshot. I found Between The Acts often surprisingly direct in its imagery.

There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive-green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round.

Even if that’s a metaphor for the futility of war or a comment on the impasse between the genders, it doesn’t have to be. It’s a striking passage that perfectly captures the mood at that point in the book. Between The Acts has several such images, which don’t necessarily have to be pored over, because in and of themselves they are evocative of that very moment. This includes impish as well as violent moments. This book is probably the closest Woolf ever got to serving up the LOLs.

However, it would be wrong to say this was an easy read. Woolf was a modernist writer, and Between The Acts is a modernist work. Despite being one of her gentler artistic experiments, it does require concentration and is not simple to grasp. A pioneering approach of hers was to try to replicate the mayfly that is the mind, often dislocating thought from speech and physical action.

Why’s stale bread, she mused, easier to cut than fresh? And so skipped, sidelong, from yeast to alcohol; so to fermentation; so to inebriation, so to Bacchus; and lay under purple lamps in a vineyard in Italy, as she had done, often; while Sands heard the clock tick; saw the cat; noted a fly buzz; and registered, as her lips showed, a grudge she mustn’t speak.

The third reason that Tim recommended this book, I think, is because much of it deals with the inner world. Woolf’s prose claims that outer action and spoken words are opaque signs as to what’s really going on in our psyche; sometimes this is meant to mislead (as in acting), but often it’s an automatic and quite prosaic process. We don’t unpick every step of our thoughts that flit from stale bread to Italy, yet we’re there, while our conversational partner has gone from clock-watching to brooding on a miserable grudge.

I would argue that it is when you’re really close to someone that you let them in to the way your mind works rather than just revealing the contents of it. With Tim, I have had some of the longest and deepest conversations I have had with anyone. Yet, more than that, I think we have an understanding of each other’s inner narrative construction, and we can spend a good while disentangling our cerebral journeys with each other.

Let's go back to Saturday night (we’d emptied the mulled wine by this point). Tim was talking of the difficulty in finding an appropriate radio station to wake up to. I knew he wouldn’t go for Radio One, and he’d already expressed frustration with Radio Four for his early morning hello. ‘What about Classic FM?’, I asked. ‘It’s alright if you want to buy a Saab,’ he said.

‘What about Radio Three?’ Well, he explained, the classical selection they play is far too random. Sometimes it hits the wake up just right with a Debussy. But sometimes, he said, it was full on military music at 6am: ‘and I wake up and think there’s been a coup.’

We debated for at least another ten minutes. He eventually detailed a convulted plan where the field recording of a chaffinch plays for ten minutes before the radio switches on.

Phoney coups.

Chaffinches.

Sharing thought processes.

You can see why I love this man so much.

Week Twenty-Two - Jeanette

Westwood by Stella Gibbons (1946)

Recommended by Kathryn

‘I swear I put that fifty pence in,’ wrote Kathryn in her second ever letter to me. ‘If it’s not in this letter, you know to blame the thieving GPO!’

Kathryn had contacted me the previous week (sans fifty pence), wanting a copy of this:

Kirby was my fanzine, on its second issue. In an uncharacteristic fit of self-promotion, I’d sent it to Ceefax, which reviewed zines on a weekly basis. They liked it, called it ‘post-riot grrrl’, I got a rash (twenty or so) of orders, and one was from an Oxford girl called Kathryn. Once we’d settled the contentious fifty pence issue (yes, it was there in her second letter!) we started writing to each other very regularly.

Kathryn’s letters were amazing. Literally, some of the funniest, sweetest, most insightful words I’d ever read. We’d write about current music a lot, the lo-fi girl groups like Golden Starlet and The Rondelles that we both liked, plus we’d laugh and laugh about pop and indie culture. We’d make each other mix tapes. Soon we started writing about our lives, our dilemmas, our happiness and our hurts.

Eventually, we met. We arranged that she would come into my branch of Oddbins. Late that afternoon, while I was up a stepladder arsing about with champagne for a dithering customer, I could see this girl with a silver backpack out of the corner of my eye and I knew it must be her. The time it took for that customer to wrap up the champagne transaction felt like an absolute lifetime, so anxious was I to actually talk to this girl who had come to mean so much to me.

She was even more incredible in person than in her letters!

Eighteen months or so after that, we became Hackney flatmates. We had four glorious years there. So many details of that home remain with me: the pigeon infestation on the balcony (and Kathryn throwing out their egg because I was too squeamish to); the armchair where we’d dump our coats; the nonsensical sticker on the bathroom mirror that said ‘You’ve gotta sleep sometime’; the Polaroid of the two of us blu-tacked to the lounge door… but mainly it was the feeling of belonging. The knowledge that she and I had a very rare friendship.

While we lived together, I got to know her literary tastes. She enjoyed a wide range of writers, was vocal about the ones she didn’t (I remember her calling Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius ‘a tedious work of staggering shite’) and she leaned towards British literary female authors of the early-to-mid twentieth century. In the last few years she’s read significant numbers of works of this style from the era, and has become very knowledgeable about it.

‘Margaret! Put that book away and come down here at once! Reg’ll be here any minute and I want the cloth set and some potatoes done, and he’s sure to want a bath, the boiler’ll want making up. Come along, get a move on, now!’

Margaret reluctantly returned to the present, put the book back among the many others that crowded her room, and went slowly downstairs.

Margaret Steggles, the central character of Westwood, is in her early 20s, rather plain to look at, and serious about Art and Literature. When she performs a chance good deed (the return of a ration book), she meets the artist, Alexander Niland, and his wife, Hebe. The grave and wide-eyed Margaret can’t quite believe she’s breathing the same rarefied air as these glamorous people, yet at the same time she is deeply disenchanted by the experience.

She began to listen to what Alexander Niland and Lev were talking about, but was disappointed to find that it concerned the difficulty of obtaining matches.

Margaret soon learns that Hebe’s father is an idol of hers, the playwright Gerard Challis. Gerard, unlike Alexander, doesn’t chatter idly about matches.

‘There is a helpless quality, don’t you agree, about a room that is prepared for a party,’ he observed. ‘The silence and flowers are like victims, awaiting the noise of conversation and the cigarette-smoke and dissonant jar of conflicting personalities that shall presently destroy them.’

Margaret had been thinking that the hall looked perfectly lovely and wishing with all her heart that she were going to the party too, but she hastily readjusted her point of view, and answered solemnly, ‘Yes, I know just what you mean.’

Enamored with Gerard and his purple prose, Margaret begins to neglect her old friend, Hilda. Hilda is really awesome; she’s a jolly sensible girl, whose pretty face and sprightly manner attracts many a man – including Gerard. Gerard’s attempts to woo Hilda are absolutely priceless. He describes the main character of his latest play, Kattë, to her.

‘She makes men suffer,’ said Mr Challis somberly, gazing at her, ‘even as you do.’

‘I don’t do anything of the sort!’ she exclaimed indignantly, turning round. ‘My boys are always ever so cheery.’

            ‘Perhaps they suffer without your knowledge,’

            ‘Well, I can’t help that, can I?’

A quote on the back cover compares Stella Gibbons to Jane Austen – and that seems very astute to me. Gibbons explores the sexual and class mores of wartime British culture as deftly as Austen dissected those of the early nineteenth century. And, just as with Austen, Gibbons is exceptionally gifted at exposing flaws and strengths through humour. Westwood has a wide cast of supporting characters, from American GIs to a little girl with Down’s Syndrome, and all are memorably drawn; the children especially are believable mixtures of gits and angels. Westwood is charming and wistful and delightful, but it is never shallow. Furthermore, as it’s a wartime story, you do get an honest sense of how it must have been for civilians: a bore and an inconvenience as much as a horrific and life-changing experience. Westwood is a superb book. I can’t think of anything to criticise in it.

It doesn’t surprise me that Kathryn picked up on Stella Gibbons – an author who is really only known for one book, Cold Comfort Farm, but who wrote plenty of others that are mostly out of print. I remember her scouring charity shops for Rosamund Lehmann books when those, too, were very hard to find. And, generally, Kathryn is gifted at teasing out life’s detail; she enjoys observing and disentangling the ebb and flow of situations and feelings, so it is logical that Westwood appeals to her.

I called Kathryn my soul sister in the Seasons They Change acknowledgements, and I can still think of no better way to express my feelings towards her. She’s still just incredible. Westwood is, too: yet it could never, ever be as incredible as she.

Week Eleven - Jeanette

The Lady In The Lake by Raymond Chandler (1943)

Recommended by Helen

My last book of 2012 – and the final one before this project dictated my reading – was A Bright And Guilty Place by Richard Raynor. This told the true story of various characters in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. It was a city fatted with corruption, where high emotion and personal recklessness met icy determination and ruthless dollar-chasing. It was absolutely brilliant.

A Bright And Guilty Place was an excellent omen for A Tale Of Two Readers. It was recommended to me – well, enthusiastically pressed onto me – by a friend, Aaron, over a quiet drink in a Soho blues bar (itself rather a bright, and perhaps guilty, place). As I read it, I thought: if this is the kind of book that’s clogging up my closest peeps’ shelves, then A Tale Of Two Readers is utterly the right thing to do.

Raymond Chandler observed the world of A Bright And Guilty Place incredibly well.

‘I thought they cleaned this town up,’ I said. ‘I thought they had it so that a decent man could walk the streets at night without wearing a bulletproof vest.’

‘They cleaned it up some,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t want it too clean. They might scare away a dirty dollar.’

Raymond Chandler is that uber-rare writer: someone who has near-universal appeal. His books captivate across a broad spectrum of literary tastes. There really is something for everyone. His storylines are intricate yet logical; his characters archetypal, but not clichéd; and his descriptions things of snowflake beauty. Reading A Bright And Guilty Place also helped me understand the deeper intent of Chandler. There was a web of sleaze strangling LA. Shady motives are not limited to individual antagonists. They are a collective problem, an almost inevitable product of their environment.

In The Lady In The Lake, Phillip Marlowe dots between his native LA, a sleepy resort called Little Fawn Lake, and the neighbouring small town Bay City. He’s been hired to track down the AWOL Crystal Kingsley, primarily to prevent her rash ways from bringing scandal to her estranged husband, Derace. Unsurprisingly, it’s not a simple job for Marlowe. It uncovers extortion, dysfunctional relationships, drug abuse, police brutality and, of course, murder.

If murderers didn’t think they could get away with their murders, very few would be committed.

The grace and economy of this book is stunning. Chandler tells you so much about someone simply by the way he or she lights a cigarette. This approach means the reader picks up the essentials of character quickly (sometimes misinterpreting, with devastating effect later in the book), and is free to concentrate on the plot. And it is a mentally demanding storyline – far more so than the other Chandler I’ve read, Farewell, My Lovely.

Chandler’s style also allows for some tartly funny moments.

      ‘You’re to wear Derry’s scarf. […] It’s distinctive enough.’

It was all of that. It was an affair of fat great kidneys laid down on an egg-yolk background. It would be almost as distinctive as if I went in there wheeling a red, white and blue wheelbarrow.

I did go through a phase of detective novels, perhaps six or seven years ago. However, I tended to privilege the early English detectives over the hardboiled American dicks. I missed out. The Lady In The Lake tells me of how many satisfying reads – Chandler wrote seven Marlowe books – I have awaiting me.

A movie was made in 1947. Unusually for the time, The Lady In The Lake was shot from the point of view of Philip Marlowe. (Note: there are spoilers in this clip, but unless you have a very good memory or plan to read The Lady In The Lake next week, they’ll probably wash over you).

I might give that one a miss. The first ten minutes of Hallowe’en will do for me, thanks very much.

And I’ve written all this without yet mentioning the woman who recommended it to me. She’s married to Alex (who is coming up later), and Alex has been a good friend for more than ten years. Alex and Helen got together after I left London, and I infrequently see Helen. Thus, she could have just been one of those people, a friend’s partner, who meant little more than a hug and a ‘how are you?’. But, no.

My 2011 was gruelling.  Although my spine was straightening as 2012 reached springtime, I was still dealing with fallout. It was at this point, at a wedding reception, that someone came up behind me, put her hands over my eyes, and said ‘guess who?’ in a melodic voice. I knew who it was, and I was so pleased to know that such a sunny person was close, that it was all I could do to keep a little splash of a tear from wetting her palms.