I have been meaning to read Raymond Chandler for years, and not just because he was one of Robert Anton Wilson's favorite writers. (In this interview, RAW says, "My favorite writers are James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler.") I was also interested because I like mystery novels in general, and because an old friend of mine has read every one of Chandler's books.
So, finally, I checked The Big Sleep out of the library and read it. I really enjoyed the book. Such good sentences! Chandler's prose, with many funny wisecracks, has a sense of immediacy and vividness that hold the reader's attention. I can also see how Chandler must have influenced later writers, such as Lawrence Block in the Matt Scudder series, which I have been re-reading.
After I read The Big Sleep, I was curious about Chandler's influence on RAW. Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson is very good about tracing literary influences on RAW, and I keep a Kindle of it on my phone for reference. When I looked at the book, it reminded me that RAW wrote about Chandler in The Illuminati Papers. The piece Eric references is "Infinite Cruelty," and it asserts that Chandler "created the unique literary form which is his and his alone, although more widely counterfeited than any other technique but Hemingway's." Eric also finds other RAW quotes about Chandler's influence in Wilson's style and Wilson's way of telling stories. Wilson: "All my fiction tends to follow the Chandler mythos of the skeptical Knight seeking Truth in a world of false fronts and manipulated deceptions. (Of course, this is also my biography, or that of any shaman.)"
RAW apparently read Chandler over and over again, and I certainly want to read more.
