In July 1958, the BBC brought Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler on air together to mark the publication of Chandler’s last book Playback. Here are Fleming’s recollections of that particular day:
About this time, Chandler and I were booked to give a 20-minute broadcast for the BBC on ‘The Art of Writing Thrillers’. When the day came, it was very difficult to get him to the studio and when I went to pick him up at about eleven in the morning his voice was slurred with whisky.
https://thelondonmagazine.org/archive-notes-on-raymond-chandler-ian-fleming/
However, the broadcast went off alright because I kept out of the act and concentrated on leading him along with endless questions. Many of Chandler’s replies had to be erased from the tape and, in particular, I remember that, in discussing Mickie Spillane and his retreat to expiate his ‘guilt’ into the arms of the Seventh Day Adventists, Chandler commented ‘in a way, it’s a shame. That boy was the greatest aid to solitary sin (he used a blunt word for it) in literature.’ Later he apologized to the two pretty girls in the control room and one of them said, ‘It’s quite alright, Mr Chandler, we hear much worse things than that.’
This is thought to be the only surviving recording of Chandler’s voice.
I got this audio clip from archive.org, optimized the sound quality and wrote the annotated transcript below. The first speaker you hear is Fleming.
Transcript
FLEMING: Well, the first thing I suppose, Ray, really is to define what we’re supposed to be talking about and the, I think the title of, the title of what we’re supposed to be talking about is, uh, the English and American thriller. The first thing is what is a thriller. In my mind, of course, you don’t write thrillers, and I do.
CHANDLER: I do, too.
FLEMING: I don’t call yours, you’re the novelist.
CHANDLER: Well, other people call ’em thrillers.
FLEMING: I know. I think it’s wrong.
CHANDLER: Yeah.
FLEMING: No, I mean, you write novels of suspense like, uh, Simenon does, and Eric Ambler does perhaps. But in which violence is the background just as love might be in the, in the ordinary kind of straight, straight world.
CHANDLER: Well, in America, a thriller or mystery story writer, as we call them, is slightly below the salt.
FLEMING: Well, a thriller writer, yes, very below the salt, really.
CHANDLER: You can write a very lousy, long, historical novel full of sex, and it can be a bestseller, and you can be treated respectfully.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: But a very good thriller writer who writes far, far better, just gets a little paragraph or so.
FLEMING: Yes, I know, it could be true.
CHANDLER: Mostly.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: There’s no attempt to judge him as a writer.
FLEMING: Well, I don’t know, I suppose, but you yourself are judged as a writer, and Dashiell Hammett was, I think.
CHANDLER: Yes, but how long did it take me? You starve to death for ten years before your publisher knows you’re any good.
FLEMNING: Well, yes, of course, uh, your, your first story is now a very valuable first edition. Where do you, where do you get your material? I mean, these, these, uh, nearly always a Californian setting, isn’t it? Has it ever not been a Californian setting?
CHANDLER: Well, I lived many years in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles had never been written about. California had been written about in a book called Ramona. A lot of sentimental slop. But nobody in my time had tried to write about the Los Angeles background in a sort of realistic way. Of course, now half the writers in America live in California.
FLEMING: But Nathanael West did, I think, didn’t he? At least, um …
CHANLDER: Yeah, but he came along much, much later.
FLEMING: Yes, he did, that’s quite true. Well, I, as far as my material is concerned, I’m afraid I just get mine by going to places and taking down copious notes, because I can’t remember anything.
CHANDLER: Yes, but you’re an experienced journalist.
FLEMING: Well, I think that’s probably the answer.
CHANDLER: Yeah.
FLEMING: I mean, I learned by writing it.
CHANDLER: You can go to Las Vegas and you can get Las Vegas for a few days. Except the ice water.
FLEMING: Right.
CHANDLER: Heh, heh.
FLEMING: Oh, yes, you complained about some of our, one of the meals that my James Bond ordered in Las Vegas. I described the meal, and I didn’t get him the waitress bringing the ice water as the first thing. Doesn’t that dog complain?
CHANDLER: Well, that amused me, because that’s the first thing that happens in an American restaurant.
FLEMING: I kicked myself.
CHANDLER: It’s a glass of ice water put down by the waitress on a busboy.
FLEMING: Yeah. I kicked myself.
CHANDLER: The busboy isn’t comparable to a commie here.
FLEMING: Yeah. Yes, because I rather pride myself on trying to get these details right. And, uh, that is a very bad way.
CHANDLER: But I don’t think any English writer has ever got as many right as you have.
FLEMING: I don’t know, it’s laborious work.
CHANDLER: I mean, that stuff in Harlem was wonderful.
FLEMING: Was it?
CHANDLER: I thought it was, and also in St. Petersburg.
FLEMING: I rather liked St. Petersburg.
CHANDLER: Well, I don’t think any American could have done it more accurately.
FLEMING: I find, I don’t know if you do, uh, extremely difficult to, um, to, to, uh, write about villains. Villains I find extremely difficult people to put one’s finger on. You can often sort of find heroes wandering around life, and meet them, come across them, and plenty of heroines, of course. But a really good, solid villain is a very difficult person to, um, to build up, I think.
CHANDLER: I don’t think I ever, in my own mind, think anybody’s a villain.
FLEMING: No, I think that comes out in the books. But you have some quite, uh, tough villainous people there.
CHANDLER: Yes, they, they exist.
FLEMING: I see they had another killing, um, last week in, uh, in New York, um, one of these, um, men connected with, uh, that, uh, team, that, um, dock Union man, what is his name?
CHANDLER: Albert Anastasia.
FLEMING: Anastasia, yes. How’s a sort of killing like that arranged?
CHANDLER: Very simply. You want me to describe how it’s done?
FLEMING: Yes. Yes.
CHANDLER: Well, first of all, the syndicate decided has to decide that he must be killed and they don’t want to kill people.
FLEMING: No.
CHANDLER: It’s bad business nowadays.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: Then when they make the decision, they telephone to a couple of chaps, say, in Minneapolis. From hardware stores or something rather, and have a respectable business front. And these chaps come along to New York, and they’re given their instructions. And they’re told, they’re given a photograph of the man, and told what’s known about him. And when they get on the plane, if they have to get on the plane …
FLEMING: In Minneapolis?
CHANDLER: They’re given guns. No, not in Minneapolis. No, after they get their instructions.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: They’re given guns.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: Now these guns are not defaced in any way.
FLEMING: No.
CHANDLER: But they’re guns that have passed through so many hands. But they can, present owners can never be traced. The company could say the first purchaser. So they go, uh, to where the man lives. They got an apartment across the street from him, or a room. And they study him for days and days and days until they know just exactly when he goes out, when he comes home, what he does. And when they’re ready, they simply walk up to him and shoot him. They have to have a crash car. Bugsy Siegel was a great man for the crash car.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: The crash car is in case a police car should come down the street. And it accidentally, on purpose, smashes the police car. So the other fellows get away, they get back on the plane, go home, that’s all there is to it.
FLEMING: And they drop the guns? They drop the guns at the spot?
CHANDLER: They always drop the guns, yes.
FLEMING: And wear gloves?
CHANDLER: How many fingerprints have ever been taken off guns?
FLEMING: Yes, quite.
CHANDLER: If you hold them by the butt.
FLEMING: Yes, that’s quite true. Of course, they always appear to be taken off in books, but I suspect that because by filing your, by filing the, um, uh, material on the butt, and, um, scraping it well, of course you make a rough surface, it won’t take any prints at all.
CHANDLER: No. Butts aren’t made that way.
FLEMING: No.
CHANDLER: They’re made to be rough.
FLEMING: Yes, quite true. How much that, how much do they get paid for that each?
CHANDLER: Ten thousand.
FLEMING: Ten thousand each?
CHANDLER: Mmhmm. If it’s an important man.
FLEMING: Yes.
CHANDLER: And small money to the syndicate.
FLEMING: Yeah. And then they go back to their jobs in the hardware stores in, uh, Minneapolis.
CHANDLER: Yeah. Quite impersonal.
FLEMING: Yeah, they don’t mind one way or the other.
CHANDLER: They don’t care a thing about the man. They don’t care if he’s dead or alive.
FLEMING: No.
CHANDLER: It’s just a job to them.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: Of course, they have to be a certain sort of people.
FLEMING: Yes, they do.
CHANDLER: Or they wouldn’t do it. I mean, they’re not like us. We wouldn’t do it.
FLEMING: No. Difficult thing to imagine doing.
CHANDLER: Mm hmm. Well, I’ve known people I’d like to shoot.
FLEMING: For instance, anybody in England?
CHANDLER: No, not in England.
FLEMING: What did you want to shoot them for?
CHANDLER: I just thought they were better dead.
FLEMING: But again, to go back to villains, of course, the difficulty is, in writing about a man such as the people you describe, uh, is to be certain oneself, uh, and to be able to persuade the reader that the man is not to be pitied for being a sick man. It’s difficult to depict somebody who really is tough without being a psychopath.
CHANDLER: Well, it’s almost impossible to imagine an absolutely bad man who is not a psychopath.
FLEMING: It is, I know. And then you see, you create pity for him at once. It’s difficult. That’s what I mean about villains. Villains are very difficult people to build up.
CHANDLER: Well, he may have his very human side. He may very, be very kind to his family.
FLEMING: Yes.
CHANDLER: But in his business, illegitimate.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: He may be quite ruthless.
FLEMING: Mm. One’s got to know these people. You can’t invent them.
CHANDLER: You don’t find any, anyone really that’s all bad.
FLEMING: Now, do you think, I mean, uh, so far as heroes are concerned, because your hero, Philip Marlowe, is, um, is a real hero. I mean, he behaves in a heroic fashion. Uh, my leading character, James Bond, I never intended to be a hero. I intended him to be a sort of blunt instrument wielded by a government department who would get him into bizarre and fantastic, uh, situations and more or less, um, shoot his way out of them. Get out of them one way or another. But of course he’s always referred to as my hero, but I don’t see him as a hero myself. I think he’s um, on the hell rather unattractive …
CHANDLER: You want to.
FLEMING: You want to, I know. ’cause then he would have more. One would … I certainly write about him with more, um, feeling and more kindness, probably.
CHANDLER: Well, I think you did in Casino Royale.
FLEMING: Do you?
CHANDLER: Yeah.
FLEMING: Well, I, yes, he had some emotions at the end when the girl died, but that …
CHANDLER: Uh, uh, well, that’s all right, but anyway, a man on his job can’t afford tender emotions.
FLEMING: Well, that’s what I feel.
CHANDLER: He feels them, but he has to quell them.
FLEMING: Yeah. On the other hand, Philip Marlowe feels them and, and, and speaks about them. He may speak about …
CHANDLER: He’s always confused.
FLEMING: He is.
CHANDLER: He’s like me.
FLEMING: But, uh, for instance, I mean, I managed to get hold of an advance copy of your last book, the one that’s, uh, just coming out, Playback. And, um, I was very interested by this, uh, passage, um, talking about, uh, violence and, I mean, uh, toughness and so on and so forth. This seemed to me very well put. He’s, uh, he’s gone into this girl’s bedroom having overheard her conversation with a blackmailer.
(Fleming reads from Playback.)
She brought out a small automatic up from her side.
I looked at it. “Oh, guns,” I said. “Don't scare me with guns. I've lived with them all my life. I teethed on an old derringer, single shot, the kind the riverboat gamblers used to carry. As I got older, I graduated to a lightweight sporting rifle. Then a .303 target rifle, and so on. I once made a bull at 900 yards with open sights. In case you don't know, the whole target looks the size of a postage stamp at 900 yards.”
“A fascinating career,” she said.
“Guns never settle anything,” I said. “They're just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”
FLEMING: I think that’s well put. But you see, I, uh, I mean, that is a far more, sort of, sensible point of view than the one which I put forward in my books, where people are shooting each other so much, so often, that you often need a program to tell which, who’s in the act, and who’s the spectator?
CHANDLER: Why do you always have to have a torture scene?
FLEMING: Well, do I always? Yes, let me think now.
CHANDLER: Well, I’ll tell you …
FLEMING: Well, maybe you’re right.
CHANDLER: Every one that I’ve read.
FLEMING: Really? Well, you see, I suppose I was brought up on Dr. Fu Manchu and, uh, and, uh, thrillers of that kind. And somehow always, even in Bulldog Drummond and so on, the hero in the end gets in the grips of the villain. And he suffers, either he’s slogged or something happens to him, he suffers pain.
CHANDLER: Well, next time try brainwashing. That’s probably worse than torture.
FLEMING: I think it is, yes. I don’t like that, that’s too serious. No, I agree, it is a, I think it’s a weakness. On the other hand, you see, I think this, uh, so called hero of mine, he’s, um, has a good time. He beats the villain, and he, in the end, and he gets the girl, and he serves his government well. Well, in the process of that, he’s got to suffer something in return for all this success, and, I mean, what do you do, dock him something on his income tax? I’ve, I mean, I’m very tired of the fact that the, the, the, the, the hero in these, in other people’s thrillers gets a bang on the head with a revolver butt, and, uh, he’s perfectly happy afterwards, just a bump on his head. Well, I think my chap ought to suffer.
CHANDLER: Oh, that’s one of my faults. I recover too quickly.
FLEMING: Well, I know …
CHANDLER: What I know what it is to be banged on the head with a revolver butt, the first thing you do is vomit.
FLEMING: It is, isn’t it?
CHANDLER: Mm hmm.
FLEMING: Yeah. Well, there you are. See, that’s already getting, uh, violent and unattractive and so on.
CHANDLER: Yes.
FLEMING: But truth is (unintelligible) And while, uh, I think it’s certainly a criticism of my books that comes in too often, I think my, uh, so called hero has got to suffer before he gets his prizes at the end of the book.
CHANDLER: Yes, he’s got to suffer a little, that’s true.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: But …
FLEMING: Not too much. Well, I, uh, he doesn’t get hurt in the next book, which I’ve just written. Much.
CHANDLER: Have you?
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: What’s it called?
FLEMING: It’s called Goldfinger.
CHANDLER: Which?
FLEMING: Goldfinger.
CHANDLER: How can you write so many books with all the other things you do?
FLEMING: Well, I sit down and I have two months off in Jamaica every year, that’s in my contract with the Sunday Times, and I sit down and I write a book every year during those two months, and then I bring it back.
CHANDLER: I can’t write a book in two months.
FLEMING: Well, but then you write better books than I do.
CHANDLER: Well, maybe or maybe not, but I still can’t write a book in two months. The fastest book I ever wrote, I wrote in three months.
FLEMING: Yes, well, Simenon writes them in about, uh, a week or ten days.
CHANDLER: Mm hmm, and so could Erle Stanley Gardner.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: In fact, uh, or Edgar Wallace.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: Another story about Edgar Wallace going to Hollywood, and they asked him if he would write an original story for a screenplay, and they expect him to take about six weeks. This was on a Friday, he was back on Monday with it finished.
FLEMING: Well, I was hoping they paid him for the whole six weeks.
CHANDLER: Well, I think it’s a flat sum.
FLEMING: Well, I’m glad to hear it. But, uh, your man, your hero, Philip Marlowe, is he based on, more or less, on yourself, so to speak? I mean, I see a certain, in fact, I see a distinct relationship between, uh, you and Philip Marlowe.
CHANDLER: Oh, not deliberately.
FLEMING: No.
CHANDLER: But if so, it just happened.
FLEMING: One writes about what one knows, of course. Well, my chap, uh, I suppose he’s got some foibles that I’ve got, but, um, I wouldn’t have said he had any relation to the person I think I am, but no, it is.
CHANDLER: Can you play Baccarat as well as he can?
FLEMING: Not as well, now. I’d like to be able to. I love it. I love gambling.
CHANDLER: I don’t enjoy gambling at all. It’s the only vice I don’t possess.
FLEMING: Oh, come, come. There are plenty left, aren’t there?
CHANDLER: Well, it is the only vice I don’t possess. I have no interest in gambling.
FLEMING: Would you say that there are any sort of, um, basic differences between the English and the American thriller?
CHANDLER: Oh, yes. Except for a few exceptions, like, uh, well, I shouldn’t say except for a few exceptions. It’s a bad tautology, isn’t it? Like yourself. And there are a few. The American thriller is much faster paced.
FLEMNING: Yeah. We’ve got into a rather sort of tea and muffin school of writing here, I think. You know, the people, the policemen are much too nice and, uh, always drinking cups of tea and, uh, inspectors puff away at pipes and, uh. The whole thing goes on in a rather sort of quiet atmosphere, some little village somewhere, I mean. Now of course, you’ve got the private eye tradition, which, um, we haven’t got so much over here because, uh, our detectives are, uh, private detectives are, on the whole, just ordinary little people who, uh, follow married couples around and try and catch them out and so on and so forth.
CHANDLER: So they are in America.
FLEMING: Yes. But of course they’re written up to be much more.
CHANDLER: Oh, well, the private eye is a catalyst.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: He’s the man who resolves the situation.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: He doesn’t exist in real life.
FLEMING: No, he doesn’t.
CHANDLER: Unless you can make him seem real.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: He doesn’t make any money, does he?
FLEMING: Marlowe seems real to me. I mean, I, I visualize him quite clearly.
CHANDLER: Oh, I know, but that’s because I’ve known him so long.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: He’s not, uh, not real as a specimen of a private detective.
FLEMING: Yeah. Well, I suppose the same thing applies to Secret Service agents. I mean, I’ve known quite a number of them, and, uh, on the whole, they’re very sort of quiet, peace-loving people who you might meet in the street, sitting next to you in your club. In fact, two or three do sit next to me in my club.
CHANDLER: They must have an immense interior courage, though.
FLEMING: They must, because it’s a dull job, and they get no thanks for it, and they get no medals, and it’s pretty bad on the wives, too. They have a hard time. Apart from the danger and all the rest of it, which does occur.
CHANDLER: Wives of policemen don’t have a very good time in America.
FLEMING: They don’t.
CHANDLER: The policemen get shot every once in a while.
FLEMING: Yes, of course, you shoot much more than we do over here.
CHANDLER: Oh, they carry guns.
FLEMING: Yes.
CHANDLER: Although I’ve known a police captain, a lawyer, who carried a gun for 28 years. I’ve never used it except when I’m required to on a police pistol range to qualify. Never shot a man with it.
FLEMING: No. Well, I was head up in America going about 96 miles an hour last year in a Studelec, which is our favourite car of mine in America. It’s a combined Studebaker and Cadillac. And I went along, I was taken along to the sheriff’s office by this, uh, speed cop. And we got more or less friendly, and then he showed me his gun, and I said, “Have you ever let this off in anger?” And he said, “I wouldn’t think of doing so.” He said, the number of forms we have to fill up for every time he let off a gun is so dreadful, he said, I might throw it at somebody, but I’d certainly not fire it. He was a wonderful chap. Well, we should be talking more about real crime than sort of fictional crime. Um, if you sort of, uh, planning any kind of a new book now? I mean, we’ve got this one coming out today.
CHANDLER: Well, I got myself in a bad spot now.
FLEMING: In what way?
CHANDLER: That fellow has to get married.
FLEMING: He is, Marlowe’s gonna get married, is he?
CHANDLER: Yes, but it’s gonna be an awful struggle. So she’s not going to like him sticking to his rather seedy profession, as she’d consider it. And he is not at all going to like the way she wants to live in an expensive house in Palm Springs with a lot of freeloaders coming in all the time. So it’s going to be a struggle, may end in a divorce, I don’t know.
FLEMING: Oh, golly. You wouldn’t like to go and kill her off, perhaps?
CHANDLER: Kill her? Yeah. Oh, no. She’s too nice.
FLEMING: She is, is she? Uh huh. Linda1, isn’t it?
CHANDLER: Uh huh. Yes. Much too nice to kill off.
FLEMING: Oh. Oh, well. Well, I don’t think my fella’s gonna get married.
CHANDLER: Of course, if I had Marlowe killed off, it’d solve a lot of problems. I wouldn’t have to write any more books about him.
FLEMING: Well, you’ve always meant to write a play, anyway, haven’t you?
CHANDLER: Oh, yes. I want to write a play.
FLEMING: Yes. What’s your dialogue?
CHANDLER: I want to write a play about Luciano2, if you’ll let me.
FLEMING: What we’ve talked about really are the basic ingredients of, of, of thrillers. I mean, really our conversation is covered more or less. One could write almost a couple of, uh, books on, uh, what we’ve been talking about. I mean, the Luciano situation is one, and, uh, a detailed story of one of these gang killings, as you described, the man coming down from Minneapolis is another one. But, um, I, I wonder what the basic ingredients of a good, good thriller really are. Of course, you’ve got to have pace. It should start at the first page and carry you right through. And I think you’ve got to have violence. I think you’ve got to have a certain amount of sex. You’ve got to have basic plot. People have got to want to know what’s going to happen by the end of it.
CHANDLER: Yes, I agree. There has to be an element of mystery. In fact, there has to be a mysterious situation.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: The detective doesn’t know what it’s all about.
FLEMING: Yeah.
CHANDLER: He knows that there’s something strange about it, but he doesn’t know just what it’s all about. And it seems to me that the real mystery is not who killed Sir John in his study, but what the situation really was, what the people were after, what sort of people they were.
FLEMING: Yes, that’s exactly what you write about, because you develop your characters very much more than I do. And the thriller element, it seems to me, in your books, is in the, uh, in the people, the, the character building, and to a considerable extent in the dialogue, which I, of course, I think is, is some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today. And, uh, but I think basically we’re both of us, to a certain extent, humourists, too. I mean, we, we’re both of us rather like, uh, to bring in, uh…
CHANDLER: That’s true.
FLEMING: Which possibly might not come out at first sight, but we like making funny jokes.
CHANDLER: Well, so and so is really rather a bore.
FLEMING: (unintelligible) Um, have you got any particular favourite thriller writers, Ray? I mean, people who automatically buy more or less blind.
CHANDLER: Well, I don’t have to buy them, they send them to me free.
FLEMING: They do? Mm hmm.
CHANDLER: Publishers do.
FLEMING: Oh, lucky. I’ve just bought The Taste of Ashes by Howard Browne, which looks good.
CHANDLER: Well, I guess he’s improving quite a lot. Must be.
FLEMING: He wrote a book called Thin Air before, I don’t know if you’ve read that.
CHANDLER: No.
FLEMING: Well, that’s very good. And then, uh, another one called Operator I’ve just bought, haven’t read yet.
CHANDLER: Did you read a book called Knock and Wait a While?
FLEMING: No, I didn’t.
CHANDLER: An American writer whose name I forgot.3
FLEMING: No.
CHANDLER: It’s, uh, an intelligence agent’s story, but I thought it was very real.
FLEMING: I’ll write that down, get hold of it.
CHANDLER: This assignment was to prevent a Russian girl from being kidnapped on board a Russian ship and taken back to Russia.
FLEMING: And who was this man, James Anthony Phillips, you were mentioning to me?
CHANDLER: James Atlee. A T L E E.
FLEMING: Atlee Phillips. Well, you said that he was one of the most remarkable mystery writers in America, and I’m ashamed to say I …
CHANDLER: Well, I think he’s a damn good writer by any standard.
FLEMING: Yeah. What’s he written in this book?
CHANDLER: Pagoda, you mentioned. Pagoda, uh, Suitable for Framing, The Deadly Mermaid. And he wrote one called The Shivering Chorus Girls, which I never could get hold of.
FLEMING: Yeah. It’s a trouble. I believe there’s some very good thrillers, you know, that the publishers let get out of print. And, uh, vanish off the, off the scene. I’m sure in publishers lists there are a lot of very good thrillers tucked away that have been forgotten and ought to be brought out and brushed down again. There aren’t enough good thrillers for me. I mean, I like reading them on airplanes and trains. Kind of books to pass the time with. But anyway, thanks, Ray. It’s been nice to see you again.
CHANDLER: Well, I love to see you always.
End of Transcript
- Linda Loring in The Long Goodbye, she’s Marlowe’s love interest. She first meets Marlowe at Victor’s, where both have gone to commemorate Terry Lennox by drinking a gin gimlet. Later she becomes friends with him, and they have sex once it’s established that she’s divorcing her husband. She’s thirty-six and is worth at least $8 million.
In Playback, she phones Marlowe from the Ritz Hotel in Paris, having gone there at the end of The Long Goodbye to divorce her husband, Dr. Edward Loring. She wants to marry Marlowe, and he agrees to send her a plane ticket to get her back to Los Angeles (even though she’s a millionaire).
In “The Poodle Spring Story” she’s now married to Marlowe (and, so, is probably named Linda Marlowe). ↩︎ - In the article “Notes On Raymond Chandler” in the December 1959 issue of The London Magazine Fleming explains, why Chandler never wrote the play about Lucky Luciano:
“When Chandler came back a month later he was full of the idea of writing a play about a wronged gangster. This would have been very much in Chandler’s later vein and I did all I could to encourage him, but he refused to go forward with the idea until he had obtained Luciano’s sanction. It was again typical of him that, although he need not have involved Luciano’s name or the details of his case in any way, he felt the man had been kicked around enough and must now be treated gently. Luciano replied that he would rather Chandler did not write this story and that was that.” ↩︎ - William Rawle Weeks, Winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award 1958. ↩︎
Raymond Chandler Dead men are heavier than broken hearts 
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