Posts Tagged ‘Lucky Jim’

AWOL

I placed the climactic sex scene in the house of a friend of mine in Baltimore’s Federal Hill. I knew exactly, from well before I wrote it, what the characters would do, and what they would say — and what music I wanted playing when, later on, someone made a movie of it.

Thurgood, Perry, and the Long-Ago Thirties

Thurgood Marshall’s 1930s world formed by the separate but equal doctrine, and Perry Mason’s fictional 1930s world in which lawyer ethics were still optional, seem very strange. What will our world seem like in 80 years?

At the Apex

Originally Kingsley Amis told me he would have to leave at around one. However, as I was apparently making the right impression, he then invited me to come along with him to what I later learned was a fixture in his life at the time, a Tuesday lunch gathering with various conservatively-minded writers at Bertorelli’s, an Italian restaurant. I was very impressed.