When Raymond Chandler began to write for pulp magazines in the Thirties, he planned from the first to smuggle something like literature into them. Most of these magazines hooked their readers with a mixture of sex and violence – “they have juxtaposed the steely automatic and the frilly panty and found that it pays off”, wrote SJ Perelman. But Chandler wanted to do more than titillate: he had designs on his audience’s subconscious. He planned to sneak into his stories a quality which readers “would not shy off from, perhaps not even know was there … but which would somehow … Continue reading Raymond Chandler’s Novels Under the Magnifying Glass