The other day, I left my mobile phone at home. Now, don’t panic – I didn’t anyway. To be honest, I didn’t even realise I didn’t have a signal until someone sent me an e-mail, reproaching me for not answering his calls. “I left my phone at home,” I told the guy, who was panicking for my sake. “Well, go home and get it,” he missived back.

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there’s an e-mail, most of the time there’s a letter, someone wants something of you- Stephen Fry

And why would I do that, I reasoned. To spend an hour stuck in traffic just to get my phone back and be able to speak to someone who was sending me an e-mail a minute is, beyond a reasonable doubt, a bit mad.

So what did I do? Nothing, really. I just took out my Raymond Chandler anthology and invested my eyesight in following Philip Marlowe.

There is, of course, a first chapter to this story. It all started late last year when I decided that, for my age, I wasn’t reading enough. But since I’m not exactly young enough to be able to afford wasting my time, I decided to go for a limited genre, one which I could finish by the time I was ready for the big sleep.

So I rolled the dice and came up with Swedish detective drama written in the 1960s. I know that sounds like a mouthful, but it’s actually not. Rather, it’s a bit of a trick I played on myself because the genre essentially consists of just 10 books written by two authors: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

But reading isn’t a straight stretch of tarmac leading you to your destination of choice – what good books do is give you clues to other good books.

Which explains why I found myself time-travelling back to 1939 and picking up Raymond Chandler’s first novel. Then the second. And now the third.

There’s something strange about reading 70-year-old words which, despite their age, skip and gambol around on the page and beyond it. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s words are simple, elegant, timeless. And Chandler’s prose is as naughty and irreverent as a bright teenager.

Just read how Chandler manages to flesh out Moose Malloy, a character in Farewell, My Lovely, in just one sentence: “He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck.” I had to read that sentence a dozen times, just to enjoy its every phoneme.

The surprising element in Sjöwall, Wahlöö and Chandler’s fiction is that there are no computers, gadgets and mobile phones in sight. It’s the detectives’ grey matter that solves crimes, not technology.

And that’s why, to go back to my first paragraph, I didn’t panic.

Because if great literature can survive without a mobile phone, so can I.

techeditor@timesofmalta.com

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