The Long Big Sleep

The Associated Press: Raymond Chandler historian cracks lost wife case: "When it came to death and where someone spends their eternal rest, literature's most hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe, was pretty cynical.

'What does it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or a marble tower?' author Raymond Chandler's legendary protagonist asked not long after Marlowe had plugged a bad guy in 'The Big Sleep.'

When it came time for Chandler's big sleep, however, his sentiments were different. The man who put Los Angeles on the literary map with detective novels that dismissed the place as 'a big, hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup' actually was a romantic who had planned to spend eternity alongside his beloved wife, Cissy Chandler.

That the two would end up about a block apart, one in a cemetery, the other on a mausoleum warehouse shelf, and that it would take decades to unite them, is a story with as many twists and turns as a Chandler novel."

Hat tip to Scott Cupp.