Pool of Darkness

'Why does the biographical novelist feel the need to take real lives and make fiction of them? It’s about fascination and obsession, but it can also be about excavation - a need to know as much as possible about a real person, a desire to dig deeper. It is, as Colm Tóibín has it, the art of making the real ’more real’. But most often, this need is about love and respect...'By writing about Raymond Chandler, Tom Sigafoos has been able to get uncannily close to him, to begin to understand this person more fully, and to introduce him to the world in a way that he hasn’t been presented before...'It’s a book where playfulness, setting, and intriguing conversation are doled out in even measure. The prose is lush, the humour tickles...'They say that word of mouth is the most effective way to get a book read and loved: readers urging other readers to invest time in a book, because they feel that that book is worth it...'I hope that this novel gets all the notice it deserves. It’s an informed, witty, elegantly written book, with a lively energy in its pages. It’s a celebration of all that’s good and exciting about bio-fiction, about the act of illuminating real people and lived lives; it’s an honouring of Chandler as person, as husband, and as writer...'Comhghairdeas ó chroí, congratulations, Tom - may your ink never run dry.'- Nuala O’Connor, author of Nora and Seaborne, launching Pool of Darkness at the 2024 Allingham Festival