Chandler, Raymond

This page has been hanging fire since a year ago March, and since I’ve got the breakthrough-I-hope HEIRLOOM TOMATOES and SUSAN GROCE, PRINTMAKER acrostics waiting in the wings, I thought it’d be a good warmup and character-builder to finish it. Chandler wrote detective fiction that was about more than slinky dames and flying bullets. John D. MacDonald and Michael Connelly, I am sure, would cheerfully acknowledge a debt to him.

Here are the words to the double acrostic:

Cull California for its Vine, its Creeper
Have Scheming Dames all lure for Loot: what Drama
And Big Sleep may not be for Big nor Sleepy
Nor Loveliness fare well when Tomcats tom
Detection with its Dicta and its Tao
Lets Danger threaten Life & Limb & Hymen
Entice, intrigue, inveigle–draw a Shroud
Rig Marlowe with a case as hard as Diamond