I came to Raymond Chandler much too late in life.

I have made up for lost time, reading several times all his private detective novels with their moody loner hero, hard-boiled egg baddies and lusciously bad dames. The frequent stylistic felicities and witticisms echo another of the last century’s great writers who attended Dulwich College, P G Wodehouse:

• It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window

• The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off

• She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me

If you have not read the oeuvre, start here: 

But before doing that read this generous essay by Mick Hume on Chandler and how we look now at detective stories.