April 20, 2026
If I were asked to name my all-time favourite crime-fiction writer, I would struggle to place anyone above Raymond Chandler. In contemporary literature the one who comes closest is Peter Temple, who, like Chandler, took up the practice in middle age. There’s a lot to be said for it.
A late entrant to the fiction-writing game, Chandler completed seven novels in his lifetime; another one was finished posthumously. For readers it’s a very manageable total. I read the novels in my twenties and reread a few in my thirties.
I was less systematic with Chandler’s shorter work, with the result that I recently picked up an unread – and unusual – collection, Killer in the Rain, first published in 1964. Philip Durham, who was a professor of American literature at University of California, introduces this Penguin edition:
During his lifetime Raymond Chandler published twenty-three short stories. Yet of this relatively small output only fifteen are generally known to the reading public. For a quarter of a century the remaining eight have lain buried in the crumbling pages of old pulp magazines. And these eight stories are among his finest.
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Posted by Stan Carey
March 29, 2026
I picked up Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland (1944–2020) thinking it was a memoir, but it’s more focused than that: a meditation on the emergence of her identity as a poet, specifically a woman poet and an Irish poet.
This identity is further complicated by her emigration from Ireland as a five-year-old girl when her father, a diplomat, took up work in London in the mid-20th century:
Hardly anything else that happened to me as a child was as important as this: that I left one country and came to another. That an ordinary displacement made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine.
In England, everyday words reinforced her sense of difference and lack: ‘They [the other children at school] could say “orchard” instead of “garden” with the offhand grace imparted by nine-tenths of the law. I could not.’ But it would be an Irish English word that crystallized her alienation:
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Posted by Stan Carey
February 2, 2026
In Doris Lessing’s story ‘A Road to the Big City’, published in her 1957 collection The Habit of Loving (my Penguin paperback edition, pictured, is from 1960), two young women, sisters, are travelling by train in Johannesburg.
Marie, the younger, and Lilla sit at a table with a middle-aged man and allow him to buy them drinks. Lilla, who considers her sister unworldly, chooses brandy for them both. It’s Marie’s first time drinking it.
The three get to talking about their plans and backgrounds:
‘Mom is old-fashioned,’ said Marie. She said the word old-fashioned carefully; it was not hers, but Lilla’s; she was tasting it, in the way she sipped at the brandy, trying it out, determined to like it.
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Posted by Stan Carey
December 22, 2024
Books, especially novels, often quote song lyrics – typically as an epigraph and sometimes in the body text. If, that is, the author or publisher can afford it. But what of novels that quote songs accidentally, or ‘accidentally’? This is the kind of thing I mean, in Joe R. Lansdale’s A Fine Dark Line:
‘I know,’ Buster said. ‘I heard it through the grapevine. Ain’t nothin’ happens in this town, or the Section, gets by them birds on that porch over by my house. . . .’
The line I heard it through the grapevine predates its use in Motown records, grapevine being a metaphor for the telegram since the 19th century. But you try seeing it written down and not instantly hearing it in the voice of Marvin Gaye:
Or Gladys Knight and the Pips, or Creedence Clearwater Revival, et cetera. Another example, with a song that’s less well known, occurs in Lee Child and Andrew Child’s No Plan B:
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Posted by Stan Carey
October 16, 2024
Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction has a lot of interesting material on language use and politics. Well, it has interesting material on all sorts of things, but this is a blog about language, so I’m being selective.
The book was first published in 1979, edited and introduced by Susan Wood; my paperback copy, pictured, is the revised 1989 edition from the Women’s Press, edited by Le Guin.
In ‘Dreams Must Explain Themselves’ (1973), Le Guin touches on the reference works that she consults for her writing (I’m a copy-editor: you can bet my attention spiked at this point), and adds a later note elaborating on the subject. Those works are strikingly, deliberately few:
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Posted by Stan Carey
September 30, 2024
My last book spine poem was made last winter, on a seasonal theme.* With autumn slipping in and the evenings becoming short here in Ireland, a new book spine poem (aka bookmash) suggested itself.
*
Sleep the Big Sleep
When the lights go down
One by one in the darkness,
Teach yourself to
Sleep the big sleep,
The great escape,
The pursuit of oblivion –
Dreams, nightwood,
White noise beyond black –
The language of the night,
The gone-away world.
*
*
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 16, 2024
I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’.
The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, but the elegance of her writing and the power of her stories remained, and remains, undiminished.
Recently, revisiting her short story ‘Madame Cassandra’, which was published in the 1968 collection The Love Object and again in 2011’s Saints and Sinners, a rare word in its opening paragraph caught my eye:
I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar.
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Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 