Good morning, Whitewater.
Saturday in town will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-nine, and a one-in-five chance of an afternoon thunderstorm. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 14h 45m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Viviana Guzman, the “Flute Queen” contends that the humpback whales of Half Moon Bay like her flute playing. Perhaps they do – one came close recently, as recorded below:
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot“, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.[1]
Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered to be a founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett’s Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with “private detective.” Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.
Some of Chandler’s novels are considered important literary works, and three have been considered masterpieces:Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as “arguably the first book since Hammett’s The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery”.[2]