Top 10 writers on the telephone

Nicholas Royle's first novel, Quilt, is a study of grief in which the news of a father's death is delivered suddenly and brutally by telephone.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of writers on the telephone.

One entry on his list:

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

Perhaps more than any other writer, Chandler established the central importance of the telephone in modern detective stories. It is difficult, indeed, to think of a contemporary crime investigation narrative that doesn't depend on telephones (this is true of TV too, of course: it's the very raison d'être of The Wire). In The Little Sister (1949), Chandler's melancholy loner detective Marlowe expresses a common feeling that has only proliferated in the era of mobile phones: "Let the telephone ring, please. Let there be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race again..."

Read about the other writers on Royle's list.

--Marshal Zeringue