The Burglar in the Library

CHAPTER Three

That was Tuesday night. The following day Carolyn bought the sandwiches and we ate them at the bookstore. After she’d washed down the last bite of felafel with the last sip of celery tonic, she cocked her head and said, “About next weekend, Bern.”

“What about it?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking.”

“We’re still on, aren’t we?”

“I guess so, but-”

“But what?”

“Well, I’m a little unclear about something.”

“What’s to be unclear? We’ll leave here Thursday afternoon and be back sometime Sunday night. If you’re wondering what clothes to pack-”

“I’ve got that worked out.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I’d sort of like to know why we’re going.”

“Why we’re going?”

“That’s right, Bern. That’s where it gets a little unclear for me.”

“I know why I’m going,” I said, “and I thought I’d told you. I’m going because I had it all planned, had my heart set on it, and I don’t see any reason to let a perfidious anglophile leave me stranded. Another reason I’m going is because I need a vacation. I can’t remember the last time I got out of the city, and I’ve been putting in long hours in the store, not to mention the occasional off-the-books enterprise at night.”

“I know you’ve been working a lot.”

“That’s why I’m going. As for you, I figure you’re going because you want to keep your best friend company in his hour of need. And you’ve been working hard yourself. How many dogs got a wash and set from you the week of the big Kennel Club show?”

“Don’t remind me.”

“So you can use a break, and how often do you get a chance to do a good deed for a friend and get a free vacation in the bargain?”

“Not too often.”

“So now we know why I’m going, and why you’re going, and if you put the two together, they add up to why we’re going.”

She considered the matter. I crumpled up one of the sandwich wrappers and threw it for Raffles to chase, then gathered the rest of our luncheon detritus and put it in the trash. When I got back, Carolyn had the cat on her lap and a determined expression on her face.

“There’s more,” she said.

“More what? More lunch? More garbage? What are you talking about?”

“More to the story,” she said. “You know that bit about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Well, I think you’re telling the truth, and I think you’re telling nothing but the truth, but I don’t think you’re telling the whole truth.”

“You don’t, huh?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t. Maybe I should just shut up and go along for the ride, because you know what they say about looking gift whores in the mouth.”

“What do they say?”

“They say not to. But I can’t help it, Bern. You picked out Cuttleford House as a special treat for Lettice. Once she took herself out of the picture, why would you want to go there?”

“I told you-”

“I know what you told me, but if you need a vacation why wouldn’t you want to take it somewhere else? I just can’t keep from feeling that you’ve got a hidden agenda.”

“A hidden agenda,” I said.

“If I’m wrong,” she said, “just tell me once and for all, and I’ll shut up about it, I promise.”

“I wouldn’t say hidden,” I said. “I wouldn’t call it an agenda.”

“But there’s something, isn’t there, Bern?”

I sighed, nodded. “There’s something.”

“I knew it.”

“Or maybe there’s nothing, but there’s the possibility of something. At least there was something. I’m fairly certain of that, but I don’t know if there still is. Something, I mean.”

“ Bern -”

“Although there’d still be something, wouldn’t there? But instead of being there, it could be somewhere. Somewhere else, I mean.”

“Bernie, those are real words you’re using, and you’re making whole sentences out of them, but-”

“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.”

“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.”

“Were they great friends, Bern?”

“They only met once,” I said. “In 1936, if I remember it correctly. Ten Black Mask regulars got together for dinner in L.A. Chandler lived out there, and Hammett was working in Hollywood at the time. Norbert Davis and Horace McCoy were there, too, and Todhunter Ballard, and five other writers I don’t know much about.”

“I don’t know anything about the ones you just mentioned.”

“Well, Ballard wrote a lot of westerns, and I think he was distantly related to Rex Stout. Horace McCoy wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I forget what Norbert Davis wrote. Stories for Black Mask, I guess.”

“And that’s the only time they met?”

“That’s what everybody says.”

“Oh?”

“Every biography of either of the two of them mentions that meeting. They had a photo taken of the group, to send to the editor of Black Mask back in New York.” I went over to the Biography section and came back with Shadow Man, Richard Layman’s life of Hammett, and flipped through it to the photos. “Here we go. That’s Chandler with the pipe. And that’s Hammett.”

“It looks as though they’re staring at each other.”

“Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”

“Did they like each other, Bern?”

“That’s also hard to tell. Years later Chandler wrote a letter in which he recalled the meeting. He remembered Hammett as nice-looking, tall, quiet, gray-haired, and with a fearful capacity for Scotch.”

“Just like me.”

“Well, you’re nice-looking,” I agreed. “I don’t know about tall.”

She glowered at me. Carolyn can stand six feet tall, but only if she happens to be wearing twelve-inch heels. “I’m not quiet or gray-haired, either,” she said. “I was referring to the fearful capacity for Scotch.”

“Oh.”

“Is that all Chandler had to say about him?”

“He thought a lot of him as a writer.” I flipped pages, found the part I was looking for. I read: “‘Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it looked like a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. Hammett wrote for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.’”

“Tropical fish?”

“‘He put these people down on paper as they were,’” I went on, “‘and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.’ Wait, there’s more. ‘He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that never seemed to have been written before.’” I closed the book. “He wrote that in 1944, in an essay for The Atlantic. I wonder if Hammett ever saw it. He was in the army at the time, stationed in Alaska during the Aleutians campaign.”

“Wasn’t he a little old for that?”

“He was born in 1894, so he would have been forty-eight in 1942 when he enlisted. On top of that his health wasn’t good. He’d had TB, and his teeth were bad.”

“And they took him anyway?”

“Not the first two times he tried to enlist. The third time around they weren’t as finicky, and they took him after he had some teeth pulled. Then after the war they jailed him when he refused to tell a Congressional committee if he’d been a communist.”

“Was he?”

“Probably, but who cares? He wasn’t a candidate for president. He was just a writer who hadn’t written much of anything in twenty years.”

“What did Hammett think of Chandler?”

“As far as anybody knows, he never expressed an opinion.” I shrugged. “You know, it’s entirely possible he never read a thing Chandler wrote. But I think he had the opportunity.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think the two of them met a second time, two years or so after Chandler ’s first novel was published. I think Chandler brought a copy of the book with him and presented it to Hammett.”

“And?”

“And I think I know where the book is,” I said. “I think it’s at Cuttleford House.”