“Hammett wrote the kind of man that he was afraid that he was. His preference is for Dashiell Hammett, the creator of Sam Spade. “Raymond Chandler sucks chihuahua dicks.”
“Raymond Chandler is the most overrated writer in the American canon,” he told Hay. But woe betide anyone who suggests he is beholden to him. “I didn’t believe her then, I don’t believe her now.”Įllroy writes about lowlife Los Angeles and admits that as a young man he read a lot of Raymond Chandler, the patron saint of hard-boiled crime fiction. “In 1956, when I was eight years old, I alerted my mother to the fact that I believed that world war two was still going on.” It ended before he was born, she replied. Nothing after May of 72 vibrates my vindaloo.” “That is the period of my emotional and intellectual curiosity.
He was only interested in what came before. As far as he was concerned, history ended – as did his 2009 book Blood’s a Rover – in May 1972.
“Whether you like it or not, I live in the past,” he said. It was fortunate for film-makers that he did not, therefore, say what he thought of Cop (based on Blood on the Moon) or Brown’s Requiem or The Black Dahlia.Īll the writers who come to Hay answer audience questions at the end of their session, but Ellroy said he did not want to be quizzed about “contemporary issues” or what he thought about Trump. He said LA Confidential the film, which starred the then relatively unknown Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe as LAPD detectives and Kim Basinger as the femme fatale Lynn Bracken, was nonetheless probably the best film adaptation of one of his novels. “They paid me some good dough to sign over the rights … money is the gift you never have to return.”Įllroy was a highlight of the final weekend of the literary festival, talking about his new novel This Storm, set just after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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