Criminal - The Big Sleep

Episode Date: December 19, 2014

Raymond Chandler is often called the greatest American crime novelist, famous for murder mysteries like The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. He's the subject of several biographies, and his correspondence and manuscripts are archived at Oxford. But something very, very important to Chandler had gotten lost. No one noticed until a pair of Chandler's biggest fans, newlyweds in their seventies, Loren Latker and Annie Thiel, got on the case. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

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It's from a 1958 interview, a year before he died. He's a little hard to understand because, as the story goes, he was extremely drunk. He was drunk a lot, especially near the end of his life. But what he said here is that he doesn't ever think anybody is a villain. You don't find anyone that's all bad. It seems to me that the real mystery is not who killed Sir John in this study, but what the situation really was, what the people were after, what sort of people they were. It seems to me that the real mystery is not who killed Sir John in the study,

but what the situation really was, what the people were after, what sort of people they were. He wrote seven crime novels, including The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, and introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, a clever, hard-drinking Los Angeles private detective. Marlowe doesn't have the genius of Sherlock Holmes or tuxedos like James Bond. He's just a guy. A little bit philosophical and a little bit flirtatious, but always very, very calm. As Marlowe says in the novel Playback, guns never settle anything. They're just a fast curtain to a bad second act. With a writer as big as Chandler, with archives at Oxford and UCLA, you'd think there wouldn't be much left to discover about his life. But as Lauren Sporer found out, there was one last

mystery. And the only people who could solve it were a couple of 70-year-olds, in love with each other and obsessed with Chandler. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. He said Los Angeles had the personality of a paper cup. Yeah, and I think at some point he also said that somebody had the personality of the inside of a shoebox. Lauren Lacker's been reading Chandler since he was 17 years old, and he's now 72, so a long time. Here he is talking to his wife, Annie Theo. What about the one about the blonde that caused the bishop to kick the stained glass window? The blonde to make a bishop kick in a stained glass window, yeah. That's his. That's Chandler.

Or the one as noticeable as a tarantula on an angel food cake. He was a master at simile. This is my favorite thing about Chandler. He wrote crazy sentences like, I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split. Or, I felt like an amputated leg. He had a way with words, definitely. Lauren has always been a Chandler fan.

But Annie says she was more of a casual fan before she met Lauren. He was completely mesmerized in Chandler and devoted to him. And I'm devoted to Lauren. So it was a way of really wanting to understand how Lauren thought. It was like, OK, if I can really understand and read enough Chandler, I'll know how he thinks, too. And then I kind of stepped into Lauren's Chandler world. Lauren's Chandler world doesn't just involve rereading the novels and biographies. It's hands-on.

He's photographed all the spots in Los Angeles where Chandler lived and all the places that he wrote about. And he's tracked down anyone he can find who knew Chandler. The first person that we met was Dorothy, his secretary, and she was 82. I had Annie call her up because Annie's got much better people skills than I do. We invited her for a brunch, and that's how we got to know her. Lauren poured over the biographies that have been written about Chandler's life, and what he realized was that every single one has basically the same ending, and not one of them got it right. So here's what you need to know about Raymond Chandler in order to make sense of what Lauren

found. When Chandler was young, long before he became a writer, he fought in World War I with a friend of his named Gordon Pascal. This friend Gordon is important because shortly after the two of them got home from the war, Raymond Chandler fell in love with Gordon's stepmom. Stepmother, yes. Pearl Eugenia, but she went by the nickname Sissy. And Sissy was 18 years older than Ray. 17 or 18, something like that, yeah. 17, 18 years older than Ray. Sissy lied about her like that. 17, 18 years older than Ray.

Sissy lied about her age to almost everyone. She cleaned the house in the nude. Lauren and Annie describe her as bohemian, a free spirit. Eventually, she left her husband and became Sissy Chandler. She really enjoyed cooking for him. And they also had this glass menagerie of animals. And they had a lot of fantasy between them. They played with those little glass animals like they were children, and they would make up stories.

And they would hop in their car, and they would go up into the San Bernardino or up into the local mountains, and it was quite a romance. What do you think that she liked about him? I think that she liked that he had the soul of a poet and that he was handsome and that she was very... She called him Rameo. Rameo. She was very sexually attracted to him. They were crazy about each other what some people refer to as soulmates i think chandler didn't start writing crime novels until after

they were married he published his first one the big sleep at age 51 they were married for 30 years and when she got sick he waited on her hand and foot he'd check her into the hospital and she'd call right away and say come get me out of here he would, even if it meant she had to go right back because she couldn't breathe. Cystic fibrosis, a fibroid or something that was turning the lungs to stone, essentially. Sissy was 84 years old when she died and Chandler fell apart. He wrote, for 30 years, 10 months and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. He attempted suicide after she died.

He was deeply, deeply depressed, always was an alcoholic, but he drank even more. There was a small funeral and Sissy was cremated. Chandler was sad and apparently going crazy. In the years after Sissy died, some say he was so lonely and so drunk that he would propose marriage to any woman within earshot. He died in 1959, just five years later. Because no one could find burial instructions,

he was buried at public expense by the city of San Diego at Mount Hope Cemetery. Well, about 2010, I was doing some further research and read that Ray had wanted his eyes to go to an eye bank. He wanted to be cremated. He wanted to be with Sissy. And I knew that hadn't happened. I didn't know where she was at the time. I knew that she had been placed in Cypress View, and that he was in Mount Hope, the cemetery. I had no idea where they were in relationship to each other, or anything at all about that. I'm thinking, well, gee, he wanted to be with Sissy. It's too late to have his eyes go to an eye bank, but maybe I can bring the two of them together.

So what did you do first? Call Cypress View and say, do you have Sissy Chandler there? Well, no, we can't find her. Loren kept calling and trying to get answers. And each time he called, he got a little bit more information. One time the person on the phone said, oh, Sissy is here. She's on a shelf. She's on a shelf? Yeah, with other remains. She's on a shelf. You know, I'd call again. Oh, the shelf was in the storeroom. I got the idea that it didn't seem kosher. Lauren couldn't actually go and see the urn for himself.

He needed a family member. I couldn't find anybody related to Ray. And I started tracking down Sissy's relatives. And I found a great-great-grandniece and a great, great, great grandniece. And I'll contact them. Oh, that's a great idea. Why don't you go ahead and do that? We love it. But that wasn't good enough. Lauren needed someone closer, like a daughter or son. The other option was to go to court. So they got a lawyer. Her name's Ayesa Wayne, coincidentally, the daughter of

legendary actor John Wayne. And lucky for them, the judge turned out to be a Chandler fan. And the judge kept getting rid of all the other cases. They were just ordinary cases like neighbors fighting or this, that, the other thing, and he kept saying, okay, da-da-da, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss, he wanted to get to our case. In fact, he said at one point, well, I'm going to dismiss this for now because I have a very important case coming up. He was very excited about it. And so there we were, and Isa and Lauren and I down at the table, and there's the judge.

And the judge starts asking questions. Well, the first thing out of his mouth was, I'm not inclined to grant this. Right. Convince me. Convince me. And so Isa had earlier gone to the guy at the crematorium and had asked him to be available to be on the phone. So it was like a Perry Mason thing because Isa said, well, Your Honor, we actually have somebody ready to talk to you on the phone. And out of the phone in the courtroom came the voice of the guy at the crematorium.

And the judge says, so where is Sissy? And the guy said, in the storage room. We tracked this guy down. He doesn't work at the crematorium anymore and didn't want to be recorded. But he said he remembered talking to the judge. He actually said that Lauren and Annie took up a lot of his time. He kept telling me that Sissy was cremated there before he was even born, and so he had no idea why she was in storage.

And then the judge looks back and he said, not just Sissy Chandler, but no one should be left in a room like that where people can't visit them. And he granted the petition. With the judges okay, Lauren and Annie went to Cypress View, the crematorium where Sissy was being stored. You walk inside, it's all marble. There was one room where they had a fireplace, and the niches were like a bookcase, glass fronts, and you'd sit in a big chair in front of the fireplace. It looked like a library, except that your loved one would be in a niche behind a little glass door, and you could sit and talk to them or, you know, whatever you wanted to do. And the rest of it, the interior was absolutely gorgeous, all marble.

So the place was beautiful, but what about the room where Sissy was? Well, I'm getting to that. You would bring the casket in, you'd have your service, and then there was this ramp at the back of the chapel that goes down to the crematorium. And you come down facing these two 100-year-old brick cremation ovens. Looked like some kind of Rube Goldberg affair with pipes and peepholes and knobs

and valves and things on the front. And two and a half, three foot high, hinged at the top with a hasp and a padlock on it. And that is where Sissy was. And over in an alcove to that room was the lawnmowers and brooms and the other things. Her ashes had been on that shelf for 57 years.

It's technically called long-term storage, but to you or me, it looks like she got put in a closet. There are two reasons why someone would wind up there instead of being interred. Either because it was the cheapest option, or because you just forgot to go collect the ashes. We think that he kind of forgot to get the remains and bury them like he had intended to do. Lauren also told me that permanent storage is a nice-sounding euphemism for tossed in a box and forgotten. Lauren and Annie arranged another funeral service to bring Ray and Sissy together. And on Valentine's Day 2011, they held the service at Mount Hope Cemetery for about 100 people. And they got some local news coverage.

Cypress View Mausoleum could have legally thrown away Sissy's unclaimed ashes in 1959. Actor Powers Booth played detective Philip Marlowe in a popular 1983 TV series. He read his favorite Chandler quotes during the ceremony. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars. Lauren Lacker is a Chandler buff and organized the day's event. Yeah, Lauren, I'm curious, how do you do you feel about i mean you've kind of written yourself into raymond chandler's biography now yeah i guess so i'm not sure how ray would feel about that but i was doing it to help ray all of his wishes were ignored so to me that was you know that was something that was wrong and need to be righted and so that's why i went out and did that

last question and you can just say that's ridiculous but i wonder if you ever imagine like they're ghosts sort of saying thank you absolutely absolutely i don't believe in ghosts we're very different that way in in my mind's eye I feel very delightfully that they're dancing around the cemetery. Yes, that's what I think. I indulge Annie on that level. I'm not finished yet. I like the idea that you can go to Mount Hope Cemetery to visit Sissy and Ray, and also see a little bit of Lauren and Annie. They had a line from their favorite Chandler novel inscribed on the new headstone. It reads, dead men are heavier than broken hearts. That's Lauren's spore. Lauren Latker has a Chandler website, shamastown.com,

where you can see his brand new Raymond Chandler map. It has 287 QR codes, so you can scan it with your phone and see spots that were either important to Chandler or to his detective, Philip Marlowe. Criminal is produced by Lauren, Eric Menel, and me. Julianne Alexander does our episode art. And we have some news. Criminal will be putting on a live show here in Durham, North Carolina

on Wednesday, January 21st. If you live nearby, we'd love to see you. You can learn more on our website, thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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