The Wodehouse comparison is interesting actually, I regard both as highly skilled prose craftsmen, but it’s the prose you read for, not the plots or characters so much.

Even though, both in fact have memorable characters.

I just rebought The Big Sleep, inspired by this blog. Should arrive in the next week or so, I’m looking forward to it.

By the way, though I have only The Long Good-bye on my shelf, should I read some other Chandlers first so that I’m not disappointed in them later?

Saul Bellow, well, I do keep meaning to read him. Thanks both. I’ll look into Studs Terkel too.

On LA, I’d love to visit, but it is an awfully long way away. That said, it’s on my list of places to visit.

The temperature was in the nineties, and on hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul. The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer a slaughter-city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the streets once were filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter the yards lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place.

It’s strange because even though I’ve only been to Chicago once, this still struck a memory. Perhaps someone who is from Chicago can say whether it is just me feeling the language or whether that language really is just so precise that it touches upon a collective experience.

Fante’s LA is the grittier (but still not slum) parts. Books two and three (sorry — forget the titles now)are set down by Long Beach and the Port. Book four is on the north edge of “downtown” near Chinatown and is particularly evocative of that part of the city, with occasional jaunts into Hollywood and Beverley Hills.

My Chicago reference was to Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March which opens there during the Great Depression: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”

I can’t think of any modern novels set there offhand — if you haven’t read any Studs Terkel, you might want to look up some columns on the internet. He is as close as the modern age has come to producing a Runyon and his canvas is Chicago.