In 1956 the 67-year-old American crime writer Raymond Chandler was down on his luck. His wife of thirty years had died, he drank too much and his career was on the skids. He tried to shoot himself and missed, then confessed all to a journalist in London. On the other side of the world, in rural New South Wales, 17-year-old Deidre Gartrell read of his loneliness and sent him a letter detailing her vital statistics. So began an intimate correspondence between two people who could not have been further apart, and who were never to meet ... . [This] work is an inventive blend of fiction and fact which takes us on an intriguing journey from Los Angeles in the 1950s to Australia in the 1990's' (Back cover 1995 edition.).
