Janet Roger

As a teenager I'd read all of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe stories - not so long after they were written as I'd like to think - and they knocked my socks off. He wrote about Los Angeles and its neon-lit boulevards, its sour, gritty downtown and gun-toting cops (a novelty to this young European) and made them exotic. But what really got under my skin was Marlowe's voice guiding me around the next street corner, and beyond it into a stale apartment block or a down and low bar. He invited me to look over his shoulder, let me see the highs and the lows, talked me through it and then put me in the seat beside him to drive me home. It was heady stuff, up to the point where the story began to seem incidental to the city, its moods and characters and speech patterns. What really mattered was a time, a place and the people you might run into there. I'd discovered a new kind of mystery writing and got hooked. I wasn't the only one. Pretty soon it just wasn't possible to take the Chandler out of anyone's idea of LA. By now you might have the same thought about Leon and Venice, Lehane and Boston, or Block and New York. And that's when you know they're getting under your skin too.