The Browser points us to an interesting interview with Sophie Ratcliffe on PG Wodehouse:

It’s the quality of his style and his jokes. For instance, “She came leaping towards me like Lady Macbeth coming to get first hand news from the guest room.” Or, “[He] clasped her to his bosom, using the interlocking grip”. Or, “She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.” But even in quoting you miss something. You need them within the structure and rhythm of the stories themselves.

He worked and worked at his plots. The details came easily to him, and that was the sort of writing that he enjoyed, but the plotting was more difficult. He was always asking his friends for ideas about how to plot. But the work paid off. He also writes very good love stories. So I think it’s his exceptional style, and the sheer joy of stories which offer a world where things come right. They give us a little glimpse of Eden.

Just in case you were wondering why the writing of PG Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler somehow echo each other, the answer is simple. They both attended Dulwich College in London, both did well in Greek and Latin, and they both were there under had headmaster Arthur Herman Gilkes who loved fine writing.

This BBC piece looks at the similarities.

And here is an interesting Salon piece on Raymond Chandler and his life and work:

What matters is not how Chandler was similar to Hammett, or, more important, to the now-forgotten hacks of the 1930s pulps, but how he was different. His prose, for instance — the tight, swift rhythm and sentences that careen toward the end of paragraphs with a closer that stings like a slap in the face.

Hacks don’t write with Chandler’s kind of precision. That’s why they are hacks. Chandler’s prose was the perfect vehicle for the suspense story that he more than anyone else perfected if not actually invented — the kind driven more by atmosphere and the baser side of human nature than by plot.

Which is why, in the end, most of Chandler’s critics tend to be either wrong or irrelevant. About 10 years ago, Martin Amis, in the New York Times, wittily dismissed Chandler as dated, and on a superficial level he was probably right. But if that really mattered, why would Chandler continue to be read more than 60 years after his first book? We shall see if Mr. Amis dates so well in a fraction of that time…

Most years I re-read the Chandler stories. A nice way to pass the time in rainy August.