At the very least, it could get a brass plaque. The Chandler house could still be designated a historic site in San Diego. Every once in a while, fans and soft-boiled young writers knock on their front door it’s as close to a shrine as they will ever get.Īnd it should stay that way.

I’ve morbidly searched the bathroom ceiling for bullet holes, and smiled at the rock posters on the wall of Chandler’s study, still lined with the original bookcases but now a teenage girl’s boudoir for my friend’s daughter. Chandler called it “the most inefficient attempt at suicide on record,” but he wasn’t long for this world anyway, dying months later of pneumonia at the Scripps Clinic. Two shots went off in the front-hall bathroom. Chandler got out a pistol and phoned the La Jolla cops, who revered him. Then, after 10 good years, his emotions went south with the birds after his wife, Cissy - Pearl Cecily Chandler, the love of his life and 18 years his senior - died. In addition to “The Long Goodbye,” Chandler wrote “The Little Sister” in the house, and “Playback,” and a few major screenplays. A radio writer came down here to see me once and he sat down in front of this window and cried because it was so beautiful.

“We have moved to La Jolla permanently,” Chandler wrote his editor in 1946, “or as permanent as anything can be nowadays.” Later he wrote another friend: “Our living room has a picture window which looks south across the bay to Point Loma, the most westerly part of San Diego, and at night there is a long lighted coastline almost in our laps. The owners, who apparently knew nothing of the Chandler connection, had no plans to preserve any part of the house as a cultural landmark. A Chicago concern, Glen Eagle Partners Ltd., owns the place and created plans to add a contemporary second story, a room on the ground floor, new windows, new siding - to “make it bigger and make it fancier and then sell it for a lot of money,” Barry Katz, chief financial officer of Glen Eagle, told a reporter a couple of weeks ago. In early September, the Chandler house is scheduled to be remodeled - on a grand scale. “Chandler wrote like a slumming angel,” said Ross Macdonald, “and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” But for the last decade of his life, Chandler lived and wrote here in La Jolla, in a place that has its own romantic presence - for now. He turned out to be the Camus of the Southland, with maybe a better moral compass. His writings were once considered “hard-boiled fiction,” just knocking on the door of the great tomb of Literature.

as we know it, an operating myth of lust and corruption redeemed by style and occasional acts of kindness.

Chandler launched a noir industry, creating the very fabric of L.A.

Farewell my love book