“But you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Right.”

I took a deep breath. I said, “What do you know about Raymond Chandler?”

“Raymond Chandler?”

“Right.”

“The mystery writer? That Raymond Chandler?”

“That’s the one.”

“What do I know about him? Well, I read all his books years ago. I don’t think he wrote very many of them, did he?”

“Seven novels,” I said, “plus two dozen short stories and four or five articles.”

“I probably missed some of the short stories,” she said, “and I don’t think I ever read any of the articles, but I’m pretty sure I read all of the books.”

“I read everything at one time or another. The books, the short stories, the articles. And his collected correspondence, and two biographies, one by Philip Durham and one by Frank MacShane.”

“That puts you way ahead of me, Bern.” She shrugged. “I just read the guy because I liked the books. So I don’t know a whole lot about him. Was he English or American? I don’t even know.”

“He was born here,” I said, “in 1888. Conceived here, too, in Laramie, Wyoming, and born in Chicago. Spent his summers in Nebraska. When he was seven his parents split up and he and his mother moved to England. Then when he was twenty-three he borrowed five hundred pounds from his uncle and moved to America. He wound up in southern California, of course, and that’s where he set his stories. He was in the oil business, until he drank his way out of it. Then he tried writing.”

“Because you can’t drink your way out of it?”

“He’d been interested in it before, but now he really worked at it. He sold his first short story to Black Mask in 1933, and published his first novel in 1939.”

“The Long Sleep.”

“The Big Sleep,” I said. “You’re mixing it up with the sixth novel, The Long Goodbye. It’s a natural mistake. Both of the titles are euphemisms for death.”

“Right.”

“His last years weren’t much fun,” I went on. “His wife died in 1954 and he was never the same after that. He wrote a seventh novel, Playback, that wasn’t very good, and the opening chapters of an eighth that would have been even worse if he’d finished it. But he didn’t. In March of 1959 he said his own long goodbye and took his own big sleep.”