Chandler to be reunited with wife in decades-long case worthy of Philip Marlowe

Raymond Chandler historian cracks lost wife case

LOS ANGELES — 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.

Come next Valentine’s Day, however, the story is expected to take on a very un-Chandler-like happy ending. The two are to be reunited during a scheduled celebration at the writer’s grave in San Diego’s Mount Hope Cemetery. Those events were set in motion earlier this month when a judge ruled that Cissy Chandler’s remains should be placed with those of her husband, who died at age 70 in 1959.

“We’re going to have a toast at the grave,” said Chandler historian Loren Latker, who has worked for years to reunite the couple. “We’re going to drink vodka gimlets.”

That’s the concoction, of course, that the hard-drinking Marlowe would knock back with his old Hollywood pal Terry Lennox in “The Long Goodbye,” before he learned Lennox had betrayed him.

In Chandler’s case, it was drunkenness and depression, not betrayal, that appears to have played the crucial role in keeping the author and his wife apart for more than half a century.

Cissy died in 1954, and her ashes were simply placed on a warehouse shelf in the neighboring Cypress View Mausoleum, awaiting word from someone about what to do with them.

Chandler, an even bigger boozer than his tarnished detective, died with his affairs in disarray and various people fighting over his estate. He wound up in a modest grave in San Diego, the only clue to his greatness being the word “author” that is carved next to his name on a small tombstone.

Chandler didn’t specify in his will what he wanted done with his remains after he died. But according to a letter to his attorney, he wanted to be cremated as Cissy had been. “The Life of Raymond Chandler,” the 1976 Frank McShane biography that drew from the author’s letters and instructions to others, states that his wish to be placed next to Cissy was simply overlooked in the confusion that followed his death.

“He was probably postponing getting it sorted out, as people do, and it just never happened,” Chandler scholar Chris Routledge, who teaches American literature at England’s Liverpool University, said of the author’s plans for himself and his wife. “When she died, if you look at his letters, he was absolutely broken up by it. He was already quite a heavy drinker and once she died he declined quite rapidly.”

The two might have remained apart forever had not Latker, a Chandler fan since his teens, began building a website in 2002 showing the routes Marlowe traveled as he chased bad guys down the mean streets of Los Angeles, onto the glittery boulevards of Hollywood and into the mountain-framed mansions of Pasadena in books such as “Farewell My Lovely” and “The High Window.”

It was during this research that he came across the references to Chandler wanting to be cremated and placed next to Cissy. Although the author will remain buried rather than cremated, the court order calls for Cissy’s remains to be placed next to his.

“It’s a bad thing, really, to not follow someone’s last wish,” Latker, 68, an amiable, silver-haired retiree, said recently as he sat in the kitchen of his beach-front condo surrounded by Chandler memorabilia and old photos of L.A.

But it’s difficult, he quickly learned, to do so after more than 50 years have passed.

Although neither the cemetery nor the mausoleum had a problem with reuniting the couple, neither could do so without a court order. And with no close relatives still alive to support such a request, Mount Hope’s manager, David Lugo, warned that Latker’s chances of succeeding were slim.

But when things looked darkest, fate smiled on Latker, just as it often did on Marlowe when he was looking down the barrel of a gun.

Latker’s wife, Annie Thiel, is Internet talk radio psychologist Dr. Annie. She approached an attorney friend, Aissa Wayne, for advice. Wayne, the daughter of John Wayne, was so captivated by what she called “a wonderful love story” that she decided to take the case on pro bono.

When she appeared before Superior Court Judge Richard Whitney, however, he told her he was inclined to deny Latker’s request.

But after hearing from mausoleum officials that Cissy Chandler’s remains were still in a warehouse because no one had ever said what to do with them, Whitney changed his mind.

“I’m not happy with the fact that Mrs. Chandler’s remains, or anyone’s, are sitting in a storage facility,” he said.

It was time to break out the vodka gimlets.