Thinking about detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler got me remembering an episode of "Friends" where Joey and Chandler become competitive about Phoebe's choice of a baby name. Joey wants her to name the baby Joey, and Chandler wants her to use his name.
Joey gets all wound up and says Chandler isn't even a real name -- it's not even a word -- it's like "chandelier" but IT ISN'T!! He challenges Chandler, "Name one other person with the name Chandler."
Thinking fast on the spur of the moment, Chandler says in a gently triumphant tone, "Raymond Chandler!"
Joey scoffs, "OK, somebody you didn't just make up!"
I LOLed the first time I heard that.
And the other times....
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[excerpt from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep]
No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
At seven-twenty a single flash of hard white light shot out of Geiger's house like a wave of summer lightning. As the darkness folded back on it and ate it up a thin tinkling scream echoed out and lost itself among the rain-drenched trees. I was out of the car and on my way before the echoes died.
There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them.
The Geiger hideaway was perfectly silent again when I hit the gap in the hedge and dodged around the angle that masked the front door. There was an iron ring in a lion's mouth for a knocker. I reached for it, I had hold of it.
At that exact instant, as if somebody had been waiting for the cue, three shots boomed in the house. There was a sound that might have been a long harsh sigh. Then a soft messy thump. And then rapid footsteps in the house -- going away.
The door fronted on a narrow run, like a footbridge over a gully, that filled the gap between the house wall and the edge of the bank. There was no porch, no solid ground, no way to get around to the back. The back entrance was at the top of a flight of wooden steps that rose from the alley-like street below. I knew this because I heard a clatter of feet on the steps, going down.
Then I heard the sudden roar of a starting car. It faded swiftly into the distance. I thought the sound was echoed by another car, but I wasn't sure. The house in front of me was as silent as a vault. There wasn't any hurry. What was in there was in there.
I straddled the fence at the side of the runway and leaned far out to the draped but unscreened French window and tried to look in at the crack where the drapes came together. I saw lamplight on a wall and one end of a bookcase.
I got back on the runway and took all of it and some of the hedge and gave the front door the heavy shoulder.
This was foolish.
About the only part of a California house you can't put your foot through is the front door.
All it did was hurt my shoulder and make me mad. I climbed over the railing again and kicked the French window in, used my hat for a glove and pulled out most of the lower small pane of glass. I could now reach in and draw a bolt that fastened the window to the sill. The rest was easy. There was no top bolt. The catch gave. I climbed in and pulled the drapes off my face.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
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1939, Knopf
-30-
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