En Overthinking It comparan a George Martin con Raymond Chandler, de quien nada sé pero al que describen como un jefazo de la novela negra de mediados del siglo pasado. Chandler publicó en The Atlantic, ya en 1944, un artículo en el que explicaba cómo (en qué mundo) ambientar debidamente una novela negra:
The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.
En el blog continúan ya hablando de los siete reinos y la situación en Desembarco del Rey:
Chandler generally wrote about Los Angeles, a place that was all wealth, glamor, and respectability on the surface: millionaires, movies stars, fancy nightclubs, etc. But under the surface, everything is corrupt. That’s King’s Landing. The place is supposedly the heart of The Realm, the crown jewel of civilization. But the King’s closest adviser runs a brothel. His wife is sleeping with her brother. The top knight is a sociopath who beheads horses in public. The whole government is secretly up to its eyeballs in debt. And the King himself is kind of a dick. Everybody has secrets, everybody’s plotting, everybody’s spying. King’s Landing may be a medieval fantasy realm, but it might as well be some starkly lit black and white maze of menacing alleyways.
¿No es encantador? Si no leyeron los libros y puesto que hay una serie de la que seguro le han contado todo, tampoco voy a pedir disculpas por el minimísimo spoiler.