Down the mean streets

One of the fun facts you occasionally hear people brandish about Raymond Chandler is that he was at Dulwich College with  P. G. Wodehouse. It’s a slight fiction —Wodehouse was actually there seven years earlier, so we can’t picture Chandler giving him a bog-wash — but one that sticks because of the contrast: good egg and hard-boiled egg. How could this suburban public school produce, at once, the laureates of Edwardian toffery and LA private-dickery?

Reading Tom Williams’s absorbing new biography of Chandler, though, what struck me was not how different but how weirdly similar Wodehouse and Chandler are as writers. Both have a keen eye for class markers, both create profoundly homo- social if not homosexual worlds, and both have a very curious relationship with sex: it’s absent in Wodehouse and it’s treated with fear and suspicion in Chandler (Marlowe, seeing the imprint of a would-be-seductress’s body on his bed, tears the sheets to shreds in a rage).