"Gilke's relentless sense of integrity could at times be excessive. PG Wodehouse, who left Dulwich [College] in the year of [Raymond] Chandler's arrival, remembered the Master as the sort of man who would approach him after a good cricket performance and say 'Fine innings, Wodehouse, but remember we all die in the end.'"

from Raymond Chandler by Tom Hiney. Also:

"There would be an intense blackout scene involving amnesia and usually alcohol in every one of Chandler's Marlowe novels, as well as in one of his Hollywood screenplays. In fact, the blackout scene became a distinct trademark of Marlowe's adventures. These scenes were given such prominence and space throughout Chandler's writing that they beg at least two clear biographical correlations. First the German bombardment that left Chandler unconscious during the First World War and ended his infrantry career. Second, the blackouts that he experienced when he drank heavily; specifically, the sustained binge he embarked on at Dabney's.

There are of course other, less subtextual, reasons why Chandler may have detailed so many blackouts. Like other serial heroes, Marlowe must fight villains, but he can never die. One way in which his survival could retain any sort of credibility is for him to receive regular non-fatal blows. That said, few action writers can ever have given the head injury so much attention, or lavished upon it as much imagery, as did Chandler."

In his book The Dream Endures, Kevin Starr mentions a San Francisco chef called Tao Yuen who "had been trained before the Revolution at the Imperial School of Cookery in Peking where the textbook was the 753-volume, three-million-page Imperial Encyclopedia of National Cookery." I can't find any other reference to this entity, but there's something a bit Borgesian about a cookbook so demonically comprehensive that you'd starve to death long before you even got to the end of the marinades – "The Book of Sand" in particular comes to mind, plus, as ever, "The Library of Babel". Scattered through the Encyclopedia, presumably, are recipes that have not yet been read for dishes that have not yet been invented using ingredients that have not yet been discovered. Talking of Borges, it's good to see Christopher Nolan confirm in this interview that one inspiration for his breathtakingly enjoyable Inception was "The Secret Miracle", which I was reminded of often during the film.

There's a page on me and my book in this month's Dazed & Confused. Meanwhile, the first finished copies have just arrived.

"Most notoriously, on March 13, 1919, a letter purporting to be from the [New Orleans] Axeman was published in the newspapers saying that he would kill again at 15 minutes past midnight on the night of March 19, but would spare the occupants of any place where a jazz band was playing. That night all of New Orleans's dance halls were filled to capacity, and professional and amateur bands played jazz at parties at hundreds of houses around town. There were no murders that night."

The fifth president of the University of South California was Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid – a rare and excellent example of the internally capitalised surname.

Joseph Barcroft researching chemical weapons at Porton Down:

"On one occasion, one of his female assistants travelled by train from his laboratory in Cambridge carrying a canister of poison gas. The canister began to leak in the compartment. She attached it to a piece of string, hung it out of the window and completed her journey to Porton."

Stanley Lovell researching bombs at the Office of Strategic Services:

"Cats, it was suggested to the OSS, always land on their feet, and will go to any lengths to avoid water. Why not wire a cat up to a bomb, and sling both cat and attached high explosive below to a bomber? When flying over enemy sips, the explosive cat would be released. The cat would be so concerned to avoid landing int he water that it could, it was argued, be virtually certain of guiding the bomb onto the deck of enemy warships. Exerpiments with flying cats soon proved to the supporters of the project that even unattached to high explosive, the cat was likely to become unconscious long before Nazi decks seemed an attractive landing place."

both from A Higher Form of Killing by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman

I was on the Guardian Books Podcast this week talking about comics with Sarah Crown and Rachel Cooke.

"When you live in a place that you know could be destroyed at any time, it changes the way you think."

In May I flew to New Orleans to interview The Dead Weather (Jack White, Alison Mosshart etc.), and the resulting article is in this month's Dazed & Confused, which has MIA on the cover.

Another German interview with me put through Google Translate. I'm described as "the wildest debut of the season", which makes me sound a bit like the flighty daughter of some 1920s aristocrats. Also, here and here are podcasts talking about the book. No idea whether they like it or not.

From a paper by Professor Philip Morrison, given at the Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence Conference in 1973, about the possible conquences of receiving a message from an alien civilisation:

"A message channel cannot open us to the sort of impact which we have often seen in history once contact is opened between two societies at very different levels of advance. There will be absent across space, of course, any military dominance, whether as in Mexico in the sixteenth century when military dominance from the outside was dependent upon a local alliance, or as in the Canary Islands or in Peru where it was fully external. Nor will there be the thrust of any technical economic competition, like that which induced famine among the highly developed Bengal hand weavers, faced with the machine-made cloth of Manchester. At most, we expose ourselves to the dangers or opportunities faced by the Japanese society on two occasions in its history, once when it encountered the enormously strong culture of the T'ang through a very few persons traveling; or in the nineteenth century when the Japanese system changed entirely after what was only a threatened invasion, but a threat which brought out internal strains that were very deep in Japanese society. So I am confident that on this kind of model, which seems to me very plausible, we could imagine the signal to have great impact - but slowly and soberly mediated, transmitted through all those filter devices of scholars who have to interpret and publish a book, and so forth. Note that the total gloss on Greek thought is at least as voluminous as the Greek texts themselves!"

Interview with me on a German website. Again, I've had to use Google Translate to find out what I apparently said. "The categorization is to completely flounder." Profound.

So Boxer, Beetle came out in a German translation earlier this month under the title Flieg, Hitler, Flieg. Why is it out in Germany, Austria and Switzerland before it's out in the UK? No particular reason. I mention it because I've just had a long review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and I'm pleased to say it's a review that really gets the book. (Well, I think it does; although I'm now writing a novel with a German protagonist, I don't actually speak any German, so I've had to use Google Translate. "And yet he succumb especially those who aspire as Erskine nigh hysterical after drift-order systems." Couldn't have put it better myself.)

Interview with me in The Bookseller.

"Until now no concern had been expressed about the possible side-effects of the rejuvenation operations. But on 12 May 1921, the death in London was announced of Alfred Wilson, a wealthy septuagenarian, who had made his money in ship-breaking. This otherwise unremarkable event had aroused interest because some months previously he had gone to Vienna and had undergone the Steinach operation. On his return to London he had felt so well that he booked the Albert Hall in London to deliver a lecture entitled 'How I Was Made Twenty Years Younger'. A little while before the lecture he had visited his doctor and complained of some chest pain. Both doctor and patient agreed that this discomfort was the result of Wilson's new habit of hitting himself on the chest to demonstrate his renewed virility. However, the pain probably came from a coronary artery disease and Wilson dropped dead from a heart attack twelve hours before giving his lecture. At the inquest into the the death it was mentioned that Dr Steinach had charged £700 for the operation."

from The Monkey Gland Affair by David Hamilton