“The classic British public school prepares its inmates expertly for taking on (or over) the world, and not at all for that half of the world known as the opposite sex.” So begins the Pico Iyer review of Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved in the latest New York Review of Books. It is a very fine review, attentive to all sorts of ambivalence at the heart of Chandler’s fiction, not least about the proper standard of masculine performance.

At one point, Iyer writes that The Long Embrace “is a book that owes its power less to its portrayal of its subjects than to its hauntedness.” According to Iyer, Freeman “takes long, moody trips around L.A. in which we seem to see [Chandler’s] ghost around every corner.” My own reading of the romance and corruption of L.A. was haunted by a different presence. That of Mike Davis and the brilliant chapter “Sunshine or Noir” at the beginning of City of Quartz. Incidentally, on the last page of the print version of the Iyer review, there is on the side a large ad announcing the Lannan award ($150,000) for Davis. Congratulations!

Here, in the current LRB, Davis explains the fires in Southern California “where the unpredictable cycle of seasons is as suspenseful as any noir novel.” (Davis writes, “The loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate. It’s true that other ingredients–La Niña droughts, fire suppression (which sponsors the accumulation of fuel), bark beetle infestations and probably global warming–contribute to the annual infernos that have become as predictable as Guy Fawkes bonfires. But what makes us most vulnerable is the abruptness of what is called the ‘wildland-urban interface,’ where real estate collides with fire ecology. And castles without their glacises are not very defensible.”)

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