The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved.

Freeman, Judith (author).

Freeman, a fiction writer, moved from an appreciation of Raymond Chandler’s writing to an interest in his letters, and finally, to a fascination with his wife, Cissy, who in previous Chandler biographies was a peripheral presence at best, despite being central to Chandler’s life and shaky happiness. Freeman’s method is intriguing: she combines traditional research with some private sleuthing of her own. After compiling a list of the 30 apartments and houses in which Chandler and his wife lived during their long marriage, Freeman determined to visit each one. The narrative gains a peculiar nostalgia and force from being spiked with Freeman’s own observations of the Chandler homes, her dealings (sometimes funny; sometimes edgy) with the current tenants; her entries into some of the homes; and the photos she includes. What emerges from this combination of scholarship and sleuthing is a portrait of the marriage of Chandler and a woman 18 years his senior, who moved quickly from being a great beauty to a bedridden invalid. Chandler has always been known as a complex man; this book, in bringing to light an aspect of his life only glancingly told before, can only deepen the reader’s understanding of his character.