“But his books live on.”

“They certainly do. They’re all in print, and his place in the crime fiction pantheon is unchallenged. You don’t even have to be a mystery fan to like Chandler. ‘I never read mysteries,’ you’ll hear people say, ‘except for Raymond Chandler, of course. I adore Chandler.’” I crumpled a sheet of paper and threw it to Raffles. “Sometimes,” I said, “they’ll say that, and it turns out they’re adoring him sight unseen, because they haven’t really read him at all.”

“I guess that’s real literary success,” she said. “When you’ve got devoted fans who haven’t even read you.”

“You can’t beat it,” I agreed. “Anyway, that’s Raymond Chandler. There’s another writer who gets mentioned in the same breath with him, and I know you’ve read his stuff. Hammett.”

“Dashiell Hammett? Of course I’ve read him, Bern. He didn’t write very much either, did he?”

“Five novels and around sixty short stories. He’d pretty much stopped writing by the time Chandler had his first story published. His health was never good, and his last years couldn’t have been much more fun than Chandler ’s.”

“When did he die?”

“In 1961. Like Chandler, his work lives on. They teach his books in college courses. You can probably buy Cliff’s Notes for The Maltese Falcon. How’s that for fame?”

“Not bad.”

“Hammett and Chandler, Chandler and Hammett. The two of them are considered the founders of hardboiled crime fiction. There were other writers who got there first, like Carroll John Daly, but hardly anybody reads them anymore. Hammett and Chandler were the cream of the crop, and they’re the ones who get the credit.”