The Internet, as we’ve all discovered, is a mixed blessing. One of its decided pleasures, however, is the ease with which books can be found. When I worked in a bookstore in Los Angeles over 20 years ago, if a book was out of print, there were only two options for the reader: look for it at every bookstore you stepped into, or ask a bookstore with a search service to make those inquiries for you.
That’s all changed, and today that cherished paperback the dog chewed up — that precious tome you left on a bus in Spain — that volume you saw in Jackson, Mississippi and didn’t buy — almost anything and everything is readily available. (You might pay through the nose for it, but it’s available.)
Recently Derek Marlowe’s 1966 spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic was brought back into print after decades out in the cold. Marlowe was an underrated writer who never repeated himself, which is one of the reasons his other books never achieved Dandy‘s great success. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-’80s and worked in film and television.
Which is where I met him.
He frequented the bookstore I worked at, you see. And though I can’t claim to have known him, our lives intersected. The dandy from London and the boy from small-town Minnesota inhabited the same world for a few years.
I left Los Angeles. Marlowe had planned to do the same. He was going to return to London and the novelist’s trade.
But illness and death intervened. Marlowe never made it back to London, and only a chapter or two of that novel exist.
Luckily, his other books are easily located, thanks to the Internet. I’d recommend Nightshade, Echoes of Celandine, Do You Remember England?, and The Rich Boy from Chicago to any reader interested in Marlowe’s work . . . as well as the book that started it all, A Dandy in Aspic.
Scottish writer and producer Paul Gallagher has written a marvelous and touching piece about Marlowe. When he was a teen, Gallagher wrote to Marlowe — and Marlowe wrote back.
It’s something any writer can relate to, and you can find it here.
By the way, the illustration accompanying these words is Pauline Boty’s portrait of Marlowe.
— Joseph Goodrich
Joseph Goodrich is the author of South of Sunset: Nine Plays and “Incident on Clinton Street,” which appears in the January/February 2016 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.