We take you back to 1958 when Ian Flem­ing, cre­ator of the great spy­mas­ter char­ac­ter James Bond, meets up with Ray­mond Chan­dler, Amer­i­ca’s fore­most writer of hard-boiled detec­tive fic­tion. The two authors, who read and admired each oth­er’s work, sat down for drinks one day and got down to talk­ing about vil­lains (real and imag­ined) and their icon­ic lit­er­ary char­ac­ters. The BBC cap­tured it all on audio (above). You can also find a tran­script of the con­ver­sa­tion on page 30 of this PDF. The con­ver­sa­tion, which has a free flow­ing qual­i­ty to it, runs 25 min­utes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Ray­mond Chandler’s Long-Unno­ticed Cameo in Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty

The Adven­tures of Philip Mar­lowe: The Radio Episodes

Ray­mond Chan­dler: There’s No Art of the Screen­play in Hol­ly­wood

James Bond in Drag For Inter­na­tion­al Women’s Day

This week, Paul Auster releas­es his 16th nov­el, Sun­set Park, which gives lit­er­ary expres­sion to the eco­nom­ic mis­for­tunes weigh­ing on the coun­try. The fore­clo­sures. The unem­ploy­ment. The reces­sion and depres­sion. The nov­el starts to paint the des­per­ate pic­ture quick­ly. Above, we have Paul Auster read­ing the begin­ning pages, and you can fol­low along with this tran­script post­ed online by Amer­i­can Pub­lic Media.

Auster also hap­pens to nar­rate the entire audio ver­sion of Sun­set Park, and, as pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned here, you can down­load a free audio copy of the nov­el (or pret­ty much any oth­er book of your choice) if you reg­is­ter for a 14-day free tri­al of Audible.com. Once the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion, or can­cel it. It’s up to you. But, either way, you keep the book.

Thanks to Mike for spot­ting the Auster read­ing…