Editor’s Preface

Dr. Watson never really understood whom he was describing. Oh, he knew well enough that he was detailing the story of a young man whom he and Sherlock Holmes had befriended as a boy. But due to Watson’s death in 1929, the good doctor never got to learn that the youth he and Holmes had called “Billy the Page” would go on to become the famous American crime writer known to the world as Raymond Chandler. To give Watson his due, he did recognize the youth’s embryonic talent. He even encouraged the boy’s creative efforts. But Watson’s mentoring wasn’t enough to ignite Chandler’s true genius. It would take a trip across the Atlantic, a home in Los Angeles, marriage to an older woman, and job-loss during the Depression to complete the transformation.

As a mystery fan who lives in LA, I’ve always been intrigued by Chandler, who set so much of his fiction in the “City of Angels.” Reading The Long Embrace, Judith Freeman’s insightful account of the time in LA spent by Ray and his wife Cissy, renewed my interest in the writer as well as a desire to discover more about him. My search took me to the Internet, a quick check of which informed me that there are two major archival collections of original Raymond Chandler papers: one, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford University, England; the other, at the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. Since the latter is only a half-hour from my home, it was easy to choose which to visit.

Chandler would have appreciated my route. I drove west, following the curves of Sunset Boulevard, one of those “mean streets” Ray used to write about - past the Strip with its cheesy bars, rock clubs, flashy billboards, and swank hotels; through Beverly Hills with its sentry lines of ficus trees; and on to the university’s research library, a large, square building hiding behind a bland façade of vertical and horizontal white strips. But as Chandler’s stories testify, you can’t let Southern California appearances fool you. Despite its unassuming architecture, the library houses a Special Collections room, which contains a trove of original works from all over the world. It also contained, as I was to discover, the typewritten manuscript of the book you now hold in your hands.

At the front desk of the Special Collections room, you request the material you want to examine. Minutes later, from behind a gilt Chinese folding-screen near the back wall, a librarian will wheel out a cartload of cardboard boxes. Like the files within them, these containers are all numbered, and you are allowed to take back to your seat only a single folder at a time. To protect the valuable collections, the lighting in the room is dimmed; but the tables are equipped with white-shaded reading lamps, so it’s easy to examine whatever you’ve asked for.

And examine I did. Throughout that exciting afternoon, a wide assortment of Chandler-related writings and memorabilia paraded before me. Although they were encased in clear-plastic sleeves, I could hold actual letters to and from Ray, original photographs of Cissy, the entire typed manuscript of The Little Sister, complete editions of Black Mask magazine containing Chandler stories. I was so fascinated by the material that much of the afternoon was already gone by the time I realized that I had not yet looked into the largest of the boxes. Perhaps I had inadvertently saved best for last.

Oversized to accommodate full-length newspaper clippings, the box is about twenty-four inches wide, thirty-six inches long, and three inches deep. In it, large white folders, whose length and width are only slightly smaller than those of the box itself, cover the entire bottom. Since it’s generally easier to open the large folders while they remain stacked within the low-walled box than spread-eagle them over the restricted table space, these particular folders had probably never been lifted out of their confines - at least, not the bottom one. Wanting to be thorough, I took all of them out.

It was underneath the last folder that I discovered the typed pages bound in twine that comprise the contents of this book. Though nobody seems to know how it got there, even if some clerk had at one time seen the manuscript, its title would have raised no concern. The innocuous word “Watson” is all that is scrawled across a yellowing top-sheet. Anyone who did come across the name would no doubt assume that some papers belonging to a “W” file had simply been stored in the wrong place. But since the manuscript was still there, obviously no such discovery had occurred. Until I came along. Curious, I untied the string that held the pages together and discovered this treasure - the heretofore-unknown history of the weighty relationship between Sherlock Holmes, the celebrated detective, and R.T. Chandler, a young student growing up in London at the start of the twentieth century.

I particularly wish to thank the directors of the Department of Special Collections at UCLA for allowing me editorial stewardship of the text. In that capacity, I have taken the liberty to add a traditional title and a brief afterword. To remind everyone of the fame that Chandler was destined to gain so many years after the conclusion of Watson’s account, I have also inserted headnotes at the start of each chapter. Apologies made, I now proudly present to you all - readers, fans, students, and scholars - this most revealing tale: a narrative that helps delineate not only the psychological foundation of one of the great writers in the American canon, but also - if you read carefully enough - the shadowy origins of Phillip Marlowe, one of the most celebrated private detectives in literary fiction.

Daniel D. Victor, Ph.D.

Los Angeles, California

July 2014