Random Food for Thought on The Yiddish Policemen's Union

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Michael Chabon said in interviews that to prepare for Yiddish Policemen's Union, he re-read his favorite mystery writers -- Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald. Can you see the hard-boiled influence in Yiddish Policemen's Union? Would you consider it a hard-boiled mystery like The Big Sleep?


Chabon has been described as a writer who can take genre novels into the realm of literary fiction. "His books show a remarkable ability to be comfortable in exploiting the delights of genre writing and yet incorporate enough imaginative variation on the genres to be taken seriously by the literary establishment." (J. Madison Davis, World Literature Today, 2008). Do you think more mysteries should be taken seriously by the 'literary establishment'? Does anyone care what they think?

Books mentioned last time

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Sorry for the delay. Here are books that you all recommended during our last meeting. Links should take you to the library catalog.


Author Donna Leon


Mistress of the Art of Death. And there's a follow-up, A Murderous Procession.


Author Maj Sjowall


Author Alexander McCall Smith


Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell


Thanks!

Maps!

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The Big Sleep's Marlowe runs all over Los Angeles. Here is a link for a map that shows his various locations. (If you click on the different sections, they get big enough to read.)


Raymond Chandler himself lived in 24 different houses around Los Angeles. Here's a  link to a map of those spots, for any L.A. buffs out there.

Philip Marlowe, Cowboy

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I got excited after finishing The Big Sleep, and decided to look up hard-boiled detective fiction in the library's "Academic Search Complete" database. There, I learned that some critics have compared characters like Marlowe to the cowboys or frontiersmen of western fiction. The detectives are described as "carving civilization out of the wilderness," even if they contend with an urban landscape instead of a natural one -- "a world in which [the detective] is constantly under siege." Like a cowboy, the hard-boiled detective is a loner who solves problems with action and adventuring.


Does this comparison work for The Big Sleep? Is Marlowe like a frontiersman or the hero of a Western? How might Chandler be creating a wilderness landscape for his detective?


Also: Did you think there was an awful lot of talk about thumbs and fingers and teeth in The Big Sleep? You're not alone... 


(The links above will ask you to log in with your library card number and pin).

Portrait with Cat

How awesome is this picture?

Our book for September 14, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, was the author's first novel and a breakout hit. In The Big Sleep, he combined two earlier stories he had written for pulp fiction magazines. The Big Sleep is also the first appearance of Chandler's famous character, detective Philip Marlowe. Chandler, who had been struggling financially, found work in Hollywood soon after the publication of his first novels. He went from earning a penny a word for his first pulp stories to making thousands as a screenwriter for Paramount Studios.

[Biographical information taken from the EBSCO database "Biography Collection Complete," available through the Library Web site.)

Our Next Books

Hello mystery readers!


Here are our next six book selections. All meetings start at 7 pm. We hope to see you there!


Tuesday, September 14
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler


Tuesday, October 12
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon


Tuesday, November 9
Belshazzar's Daughter, by Barbara Nadel


Tuesday, December 14
Maisie Dobbs, by Jacqueline Winspear


Tuesday, January 11
Wednesday's Child, by Peter Robinson


Tuesday, February 8
The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly


We have more copies on the way for many of these titles. And if a book is unavailable from Sunnyvale Library, try the Link+ catalog. Link+ is a free service that lets you order books from other libraries, to be delivered to Sunnyvale.

Up Close and Personal with Tony Hillerman

"[A lot of people] began the autographing chat with a disclaimer. They'd assure me they were not mystery readers. They read my books because of the tribal cultural material intermixed with the plot line. They wanted to learn a bit about American Indians. It occurred to me that I had tapped into a mass of American readers who suffer from the same workaholic problem that besets me. Reading for idle amusement left them feeling guilty. My books, like a sausage sandwich spiced with antiacid tablets, give absolution along with the sin." -- Seldom Disappointed, p. 300.


Tony Hillerman's long and distinguished life included Army combat during World War II that earned him a Purple Heart, a stint as a newspaper reporter and editor, and a childhood among the Pottawatomie and Seminole Indians. If you'd like to learn more about the author of our August book, Skinwalkers, check out these resources from the library:


Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir, by Tony Hillerman
The Tony Hillerman Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to His Life and Work, edited by Martin Greenberg


These two books are full of fun facts. For instance:


In a 1993 interview published in the Companion, Hillerman says that when he started writing Skinwalkers, he hadn't planned to bring together his two main heroes, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. But he needed "a superior for [Chee] to deal with. And there was gold old Joe Leaphorn on the shelf, whom I knew very well, so I just started using him."  (p.61).


What would you like to know about Tony Hillerman? Does reading Skinwalkers make you wonder about his life or his writing process?