Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

CULTURE SHOCK:MOST POTTED BIOGRAPHIES of Raymond Chandler will tell you that, in 1895, after his parents divorced, his mother took him from Chicago, where he was born, to London, where he grew up. In fact, the boy and his mother went originally to her own place of birth – Waterford, where they lived uncomfortably on the fringes of respectable Protestant society. It was from there that Chandler went to London, where he was supported through his English public-school education by his uncle, the Waterford solicitor Ernest Thornton, writes FINTAN O’TOOLE

It is tempting to imagine what might have happened had Chandler stayed in his mother’s native city, and to fantasise about Philip Marlowe going boldly down Parnell Street and John’s Hill. But of course, Chandler would not have been Chandler, nor Marlowe Marlowe, if that had happened. Early 20th-century Ireland was not the place where great crime fiction could happen. And the reasons it couldn’t happen then are the reasons it may be happening now.