A reader writes:
Your quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister (“She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her”) put me in mind of the following, from P.G. Wodehouse’s story The Castaways (1933):
Even when he ached for Genevieve Bootle, some inner voice told him that if ever there was a pill it was she. Sometimes the urge to fold her in his arms and the urge to haul off and slap her over the nose with a piece of blotting paper came so close together that it was a mere flick of the coin which prevailed.
Fascinating, is it not, how two superb writers express a similar idea in two very different and very idiosyncratic ways?
As you may know, Chandler and Wodehouse were students at Dulwich College at the same time!
Nice. It just goes to show the value of an English public-school education. But were Chandler and Wodehouse really at Dulwich at the same time? That doesn’t sound quite right to me.
Trivia-minded readers, solve this conundrum!
UPDATE: My original correspondent writes:
Your skepticism about whether the two authors-to-be attended Dulwich College simultaneously proves justified. David Jasen, in his P.G. Wodehouse: A Portrait of a Master, states that Wodehouse started at Dulwich in May of 1894 at age twelve-and a half, and left in July 1900. According to the Spring 2004 edition of the Dulwich Society Newsletter, Chandler didn’t start at Dulwich until the September term of 1900 (when he was twelve).
I knew I smelled a slight case of rat!