I've Got a Rap Sheet . . . Contribution

I recently contributed a piece on Raymond Chandler and gimlets for Jeff Pierce's blog The Rap Sheet.

Chandler Rights Changing Hands Again?

According to Variety, Coolabi is supposedly making a takeover play for Chorion, the media rights company that owns the rights to Raymond Chandler's literary estate.

Judith Freeman on Dorothy Fisher, Chandler's Paramount Secretary

Judith Freeman has a good piece in the L.A. Times about her meeting Dorothy Fisher, who (as Dorothy Gruber) was Chandler's secretary during his Paramount screenwriting years. It includes some good anecdotes about Chandler's behavior during these days.

In search of Chandler dust jackets . . .

Anna Kelly, an editorial assistant at Penguin Books UK, has an interesting blog post about trying to track down first English edition dust jackets for five of Chandler's novels, which the firm is reissuing with replicas of the original jackets.

The initial plan called for releasing four of the novels in the throwback editions: The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The Little Sister, and The Long Good-bye. The Lady in the Lake was added later as it looked like they might not be able to turn up all four of the original picks, but once they did turn up all four (sort of) they decided to keep it in the run. Which means, of course, that The High Window and Playback are the ugly ducklings.

Thanks to Shane Mawe for the tip!

Eagle-eyed Chandler fan Olivier Eyquem emailed me recently to say that he had spotted an apparent cameo appearance by Raymond Chandler in Double Indemnity, the movie he co-wrote with Billy Wilder for Paramount. I went back and watched the scene a couple of times (it appears about 16 minutes into the film), and I'm convinced it's Chandler, too. What do you think?



I've not read before about Chandler making any movie cameos, but seeing is believing. Olivier has posted about the scene over on his blog (which is in French). It looks like mystery writers John Billheimer and Mark Coggins spotted the appearance not too long ago, too, and there are some more frame captures on Coggin's blog Riordan's Desk.

A slight technical glitch . . .

I recently purchased a new laptop after my old home PC died on me, and I just realized that I hadn't transferred over all my email accounts correctly and wasn't receiving emails sent to the "chandlersite" addressed.

I've corrected that problem now and should be receiving all the emails into my primary inbox going forward . . .

Oops!

New Chandler Scoop!

A few weeks ago I got an email from Loren Latker that invited me to visit his web site Shamus Town: Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. I was in the middle of a rather hectic March, and the email languished in my inbox for much too long before I actually had time to go give the site a proper visit.

Wow! I shouldn't have been so slow. The site not only has hundreds of fantastic old photos of Los Angeles from Chandler's era but also publishes several new key pieces of information about Chandler's early biography. This is particularly exciting for me because I've not seen anything new information about Chandler's early life (pre-1938) in almost a decade. I won't spoil the surprise here, but checkout the timeline at Shamus Town and look for the "NEW" designation on the entries:

http://homepage.mac.com/llatker/timeline.html

This is some good stuff. Let's hope Mr. Latker finishes his current side project of repairing panoramic cameras so he can get back to digging on Chandler!