He was ripely endowed with the capacities for both love and scorn, sometimes for the same thing. One reason he liked Los Angeles was that he thought it had the personality of a paper cup.

32. Near the end of his life, he consented to become the president of the Mystery Writers of America, although instead of voting for himself he had thrown out his ballot.

33. He died alone at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. Seventeen people attended the funeral. They were made up of local acquaintances who had not known him well enough to be called friends, representatives of the local MWA chapter and a fanatical collector of mystery first editions named Ned Guymon.

34. He invented a first-person voice remarkable for its sharpness and accuracy of observation, its attention to musical cadence, purity of syntax and unobtrusive rightness of word order, a metaphorical richness often consciously self-parodic, its finely adjusted speed of movement, sureness of touch and its capacity to remain internally consistent and true to itself over a great emotional range. This voice proved to be unimaginably influential during his lifetime and continues to be so now. Real earned authority sometimes has that effect. (While drinking himself to death in the year of Chandler's own death, 1959, the tenor saxophonist Lester Young could look out of his window at the Alvin Hotel to observe the progress of his numerous clones down Broadway to Birdland, where, unlike him, they had gigs. Young said to a friend, "The other ladies, my imitators, are making the money!")

35. None of his imitators, not even the most accomplished, ever came close to surpassing or even matching him.

36. He wrote his English agent, Helga Green, that "to accept a mediocre form and make literature out of it is something of an accomplishment... We are not always nice people, but essentially we have an ideal that transcends ourselves."

37. Chandler devoted his working life to the demonstration of a principle that should be obvious, that genre writing declares itself first as writing and only secondarily as generic. Because this principle was not always obvious even to himself, he felt defensive about being a mystery writer.

38. He wrote an English girlfriend that "my wife and I just seemed to melt into each other's hearts without the need of words."

39. "The things that last .. come from deeper levels of a writer's being, and the particular form used to frame them has very little to do with their value," he wrote Helga Green.

40. He got better as he went along.