The odd couple | 3 September 2011

Years ago I did some charity gig with Will Self, a sort of Desert Island Books. He had chosen a Raymond Chandler, and I remarked on the similarities between Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse. Both were educated at Dulwich College, both were wonderfully stylish and stylised writers, both were masters of the dazzlingly witty, totally unexpected metaphor.

Will Self favoured me with the de haut en bas curled lip familiar from television. There was no comparison, he said. Wodehouse wrote about a discredited imperialist age; Chandler by contrast tackled the gritty reality of life on the mean streets of LA — or words to that effect.

He was wrong. Chandler’s world, of unfathomable — indeed inconsequential — plots, and gorgeous dames packing heat, was as artificial as Blandings Castle or the Drones Club, Philip Marlowe quite as unreal as Bertie Wooster. Both adored language and loved to make it do tricks, like a performing dog.