[ Music ] >> Sponsored by the James Madison Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. [ Music ] >> Maureen Corrigan: Hello, and welcome to the 2021 National Book Festival. I'm Maureen Corrigan, I'm the book critic for NPR's Fresh Air. I'm also a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World. I am here with the superb suspense writer, Tana French. Tana French has written eight suspense novels, six of them are the Dublin Murder Squad books, and two are standalones. Her latest is called, The Searcher, and that's the book that I'd like to focus on today, but I hope we get to talk about everything. Tana French, I'm a big fan as are so many people I know and they're so envious that I'm getting to talk with you today. Welcome to this virtual book festival. >> Tana French: Thank you so much, Maureen, I'm delighted to be here and thank you so much for doing this, because not to be too mutual admiration but I've been a fan of your writing for a long time, so this is great. >> Maureen Corrigan: I appreciate that very much. The theme of this book festival this year, not surprisingly is "Open a book, open the world" and of course so many of us have reached for books to open a world during this pandemic so I just wonder what have books meant to you throughout your life, and then more specifically, what have books meant to you during this particular, peculiar, frightening period that we're living through, still living through? >> Tana French: Well, I was always, I was one of those total immersion readers when I was a kid. I was, you know, if you gave me a new book, basically I was gone. I didn't exist until I finished the last page. I always loved reading. I kind of miss that now, because you know, in adulthood and kids kick in, you don't get the chance to do that, to just vanish into a book for hours on end. I think during the pandemic mainly, it's been really interesting to watch what we prioritize and discuss with friends; who's reading what, what it is we're looking for during this time. I know, I've known a lot of people who are looking for escape, who are reading books about really far away times, or reading science fiction that would take them completely out of any of this, and other people were looking for sort of resonance, or reading books about plagues or natural disasters. They really wanted something that they felt connected to this time. And I didn't go there at all, I went, a lot of mine, I reread all of the Agatha Christie, right, all of the Agatha Christie, because I figured out halfway through, I was looking for something with an ending, with a solution, with all the ends neatly tied up and the crisis is contained, it's completed, it's finished and we're done with it. And usually in Christie, you know, nobody is too deeply traumatized by anything that happened. Everybody can move on. There are exceptions obviously, but overall. So there was a lot, I felt like I was looking for something that would resolve everything and let everything move on. But my big pandemic book, the one that I'm just recommending to everyone during this, is Amor Towles' A Gentlemen in Moscow. >> Maureen Corrigan: Oh, okay. >> Tana French: He's in lockdown basically, he's in a decades long lockdown in a hotel, the, his main character is a count, white Russian, whose been put under house arrest in a Moscow hotel for the rest of his life, basically. And it's such a lovely book because it's all about how, even in the saddest, the most restrictive, the most dislocating times, we find ways to make connections and we find ways to find happiness and to make little differences in people's lives. And I really like that. Like I read it before lockdown initially, but rereading it during lockdown was a whole different experience. I'm really glad I had that book there. >> Maureen Corrigan: That's a terrific recommendation. You have family history connected to Russian don't you? One of your grandparents? >> Tana French: Yeah, my grandmother was Russian and was from very much that background. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. >> Tana French: She was born a countess and born early because of fighting on the streets of Moscow. So this is kind of the world that one side of my family comes from. My mother actually gave me the book going, if you want to understand my side of the family, read this. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yes, yes, so interesting. Well let's talk about you and let's talk about The Searcher, your latest novel, which is a standalone. I was blown away by it. I think it has everything; it has the plot, it has this brooding atmosphere, it has an amazing situation that I don't think you've used before, unless my mind is blanking. You have an American, who's your main character, and you've set it in rural Ireland. You're novels are usually set in the city in the suburbs and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's been a novel that has been set out in the remote countryside, which seems a little malevolent, it's always watchful. But I'm sure listeners would much rather have you give a little thumbnail kind of introduction to the premise of this novel; the main character and why he's out there in rural Ireland. >> Tana French: Well, he's a middle aged American guy who has just retired from the Chicago police force after 25 years there, and he's basically lost all his faith in the job and he's just had a tough divorce, and he is kind of having a moral crisis and he reckons that by getting away from all the places where he was a police officer, where he was a husband, where he was a father, all the things that he feels he's somehow made a mess of, morally speaking. Maybe if he gets somewhere that will be simpler, he'll be able to find his sense of right and wrong again. And he reckons that a little Irish rural village, miles from anywhere, is going to be a good place to do it. Only it kind of doesn't work out that way because a neighbor kid, whose teenage brother has disappeared, demands that Cal, the protagonist, investigate. And of course he gets drawn in for one more investigation. >> Maureen Corrigan: One of my favorite parts of your setup is that Cal buys the cottage in Ireland over the internet, right? He never, it's just, you know, based on those photographs and of course, when he arrives there's a lot of work to be done. Which he kind knows, but I guess he doesn't really know the depth of the work to be done. I think you do a wonderful job of giving us this character who has some sense of how his life has fallen part a bit, but he's not sitting around at night doing deep analysis, because he's not that kind of a man. So, you know, there's a section of the novel where he's thinking back to the conversation with his wife that seemed to be a training point and eventually led to their divorce, but he can't figure out why it was a turning point, you know? And he seems very, so genuine to me in that, that he could probably, he can read a crime scene, he can read other people, but about his own life, he's a little, he's still a little bit in the dark. >> Tana French: Yeah, he's not introspective, that was deliberate. I really didn't want to write an introspective character, because I just finished writing The Witch Elm, where the main site of all the action is inside the main character's head. And I did not want to write anyone introspective, I was very done with that. I wanted to write somebody who was all about action, for whom the defining elements of anyone, including himself, weren't what does this person think? What does this person feel? What does this person say? It was all about no, no, no, you're defined by what you do. What does this person do? >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. >> Tana French: And it's probably why the book's in the third person. Because if you're first person, then it's an implication, the implication there is that what's inside the main character's head is important. And to Cal, that wouldn't be important at all. Doesn't matter, you can think all the right things, but if you're not doing the right things, it doesn't count. So that's why third person, where what you focus on is what he does, which is what matters to him. >> Maureen Corrigan: I think that this is a novel, that if you're at all agoraphobic, you might want to think twice about reading it. Because, and I was born in New York City, I live in Washington and I've lived in Philadelphia, I'm used to cities and I'm used to those landscapes that are mapped out in streets, and this novel has so many moments where Cal is sitting outside at night and he feels eyes watching him and he doesn't, it's almost like the landscape is always watching him. And I find that more terrifying than say, walking down a dark alley in any city. But I wondered about Cal, if there was something of you in him in the sense that you were born in Vermont. As anyone who's looked at your biography knows you've lived various places all over the world. You came to Ireland for college and there must have been a time when you were still trying to figure out the nuanced codes of behavior and what people really meant. There's an amazing chapter here, Chapter 11, where I don't think I breathed once when I was reading it, where Cal is in the local pub, which is basically a cottage in the middle of a field, and all of the men around him are sort of making jokes, and he can't quite tell sometimes, how hostile they're being or whether they're really jokes. You know, he's the outsider and I wondered if, A, if you felt any of that when you first made that move to Ireland and if, I don't know if any of that shows up in Cal, maybe it doesn't. >> Tana French: No, I think definitely that was kind of a normal feature of my life up until I moved here, because we moved around a lot and when you're an international brat or it think, third culture kid is the term they use most often, international brat, you get very used to that. You get very used to, you move to a new place, you have to be completely on the alert to figure out what the codes are, what the language is that you don't speak, you know, I'm not talking you know, moving to Italy, you need to speak Italian. What's the physical, the subtext language, all of these light codes that you need to learn, so that was very much a feature of our lives when I was moving around as a kid. And definitely when I moved to Ireland it's the same thing, because the Irish sense of humor, it's quite oblique, it's quite dry, you have to get used to it. You know, I had been coming here for summers so I had an advantage, I had friends already, but of course it takes getting used to. And I thought that for Cal in particular, because it's just him, surrounded by people who have known each other, not just for their whole lives, but for generations basically. He's coming into a world where everyone speaks a language he doesn't and where they're using that against him. They're not, it's not just that he has to get used to it the way I did because, you know, you're new in town. It was that he has to get used to something that they're very deliberately using to keep him in a position where he understands just as much as they want him to. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. >> Tana French: So he's being kept on the back foot, he's being kept unbalanced by this being the new guy in town, always with great deliberation by the people who live there. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. And as in so many of your novels, the situation darkens where I almost felt like, if he doesn't crack the code more deftly, his life is in peril. Like there's a cost to not, to not really understanding what you're hearing and how people are behaving and exactly how threatening it might be. I characterized the novel when I did a review of it for the Post, as a slow burn, because you just kept turning up the heat. And it's spectacular, I would, I won't even ask you to read from it because you need to read a lot and we're on, you know, we're online, it doesn't work, but it's really spectacular. I would love to hear you read that chapter one day. >> Tana French: That one was fun to write, I have to say-- >> Maureen Corrigan: Oh, I can imagine. >> Tana French: The whole thing was fun to write, not every book is but Cal was nice to spend time with. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah, yeah. He comes to this town, yes, an adolescent shows up at his door, and eventually this young person draws Cal in and says, I want you to look for my brother, my brother, his older brother, my older brother has disappeared and the police aren't doing enough or anything. And of course, like many detective hero before him, these guys always get involved, you know, they always go on that quest. They answer that summons. You called the novel, The Searcher, and as everyone has pointed out, there's a tip of the hat to the John Ford classic western, The Searchers, and I love that. I even wondered if there was a wink that it was set in the west of Ireland, I don't know you know, over think that-- >> Tana French: Yeah. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah. >> Tana French: Oh yeah, that was [inaudible], yeah. >> Maureen Corrigan: Okay. But I was a little surprised, and I wondered if you were, at some of the kind of the blow back the have patterned this kind of homage to the western after The Searchers, which is such a controversial classic these days, because of the racism, because to for depiction of Native Americans, because of the violent you know, hatred that the, especially the John Wayne character directs to the Native Americans who've stolen his niece. You know, it's a very violent film. And that's I think there was especially one review in Slate where you know, it was almost like you shouldn't have done this, you shouldn't have chosen that particular film to not do, you know, that's over. Were you surprised, and how do you answer criticism like that? >> Tana French: I'll be honest, I very seldom read reviews because what happens then is I start thinking about the previous book which is finished, I struggle with oh, my God, maybe they've got a point, maybe I should have done this differently. And then I'm not writing whatever I'm supposed to be writing. So it's a destruction. I don't think it's true that it was patterned after The Searchers, which I'll be honest, I have only read part of, The Searchers, I've only read part of. It's definitely got serious western influences, but that wasn't one of the westerns that I was reading or nodding to in particular. I mean I was reading more Lonesome Dove and True Grit and the Sisters Brothers, for a modern one. >> Maureen Corrigan: Well I haven't read that. >> Tana French: The Searchers, no The Searchers, I mean the title has, you know, there's a definite reference there but it was more that it felt like a good title that would fit both the main characters while also having that western influence. But I don't think it's got, from what I read of the book, The Searchers, I don't think it has anything particularly in common with that except some of the western, the great western themes, like the quest, the journey to find someone. But that's just so many of the westerns, there isn't a specific reference to The Searchers I wouldn't have thing, anywhere in the book. >> Maureen Corrigan: I think it was the general situation of looking for a young person who's disappeared, moving into territory that's not your own somehow, and having to navigate it. You know-- >> Tana French: Well that's all westerns, though, that's-- [ Crosstalk ] I mean again, you know, you get that in Lonesome Dove for example, when Gus goes looking for Lorena, whose been abducted and it's very clear in Lonesome Dove that they're aware, or Gus at least is aware, that he's in territory that isn't really his and that he's doing something that isn't what he thought he'd be doing here and that he's destroying things. So I think there is, that's a main theme in, all westerns have moving into territory that's not your own, but what I liked about Lonesome Dove in particular, is that it has an awareness that by moving into territory that's not your own, you can have an impact that is not what you planned. That is not what you foresaw, and you can be much more destructive than you ever, than ever occurred to you, that you can just bounce in, all oblivious, thinking that you know, yay, I'm just living my life and bouncing in here. And you can end up doing a huge amount of damage that you never planned on doing. And that was one of the things from Lonesome Dove that I really liked and that I hoped would seep through in this book. His growing awareness that you have an impact you didn't plan on when you go into territory that's not yours. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah, that's such a wonderful point. The detective novel has often, and the mystery novel, American mystery, has also you know, been credited as having roots in the cowboy story, I mean usually you've got the lone detective, right? Now think of the, especially hard-boiled American detective fiction, kind of the almost like the frontier of the city, the wildness of the city, in Maltese Falcon and you know, all of Raymond Chandler, that kind of thing. And also that kind of tough guy character who's very interior. I'm trying to get at a question about genre because I know that you've kind of talked about genre and said, well, genre's breaking down and I think a lot of writers feel that these days, that you know, writer like yourself, you're exploring different ways to almost link genres or break down the barriers. And yet I'm wondering if there's a, if there's an advantage besides marketing, to having your novels be labeled suspense novels, or even police procedurals, like if there's an enjoyment that someone like myself gets from seeing a writer like you, ring changes on a familiar formula and that's part of the pleasure. I felt that here, like oh, isn't that clever what she's doing by almost marrying these two genres; the western and the detective novel and setting it in a different place that way. I'm not even quite sure what my question is. But you're obviously you're doing something in your work as you're starting, working with these standalones, I hope you're going back to the Dublin Murder Squad at some point, I don't know if you are, but you're challenging yourself and does genre feel restrictive? Is that part of the reason to, you know, keep pushing the bounds? >> Tana French: Well, I'll be honest, when I started in the woods I didn't think I was writing detective fiction, I thought I was just writing a book that had a detective framework. Because otherwise, I mean I write long anyway, if I don't have that framework, I'm just going to keep writing, it'll be ten million works long and [inaudible]. So I thought I was writing a book, just a book book, that had that framework to keep it in place. But then my publishers explained that it's a good thing to put it somewhere that makes sense so readers know to look. I think I came along at a lucky point in terms of genre, because the boundaries were starting to be seen not as end points but as fun things to play with. Like if you look at Dennis LaHane, with Mystic River, now that is a great mystery novel, but it's also a great social history novel, and a coming of age novel, and a family saga, and just a great book with great thematic depth and great characterization. People were struggling to go okay, here are the conventions as a mystery genre, how can I play with them? How can I use them as a starting point rather than a finishing point? And so I stepped into a space where that was very much a possibility, where you can go okay, I think I'll, I have a spin on noire this time or ooh, what if I want to borrow a bit of gothic here or okay, westerns, I like the idea of sticking some western conventions in the west of Ireland for a change, let's try that. It was very not unbounded, but the boundaries had become something interesting at the time I came along. So I got lucky I think, because I like that. I don't, I don't like being in my comfort zone as a writer. I find it very unsettling and I don't want to fall into the temptation, which I think is quite easy in genre, where you have this one matrix to work with. The temptation of writing the same book over and over. Finding something that works for me and going, well I'll basically so this again and again. And I think the mystery genre at this point is so open that it's easy to find a new tangent every time to play with. It's very accepted. I think especially in the U.S. where you guys are really, really good at creating and accepting new sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and it's just, it's really fertile ground. I think audiences like that. So yeah, I came along at a good time. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah, I think we are in something of a second Renaissance and I think that for a while, just my take on it, the excitement of the '80s and '90s where there were all different kinds of detectives and they weren't just the straight, white man, you know, people of color, gay, lesbian characters coming in and they were the center of the story, investigating what's wrong with America. There was a lot of energy and then it seemed to drain away I think because those independent mystery book shops started closing, you know, something happened there and now it seems like there's, you know, I think about Emily St. John Mandel, and the kind of books she's writing, which are partly suspense stories married to dystopian fiction, you know, it does seem like maybe the energy is also with the ad mixture of genres that you're talking about. I love the way, in the Dublin Murder Squad novels, you do something so wonderful and everyone who's read them knows this already, but you keep passing the baton, so the spotlight shifts, you know, you've got one character in the center and then in the next novel the partner of that character will be in the center and we go on and on from there. And what that also does is of course shift our understanding of those characters. So we see them from the inside versus the outside? If we see them in a different context, does our reading of them change? I love to think about the larger mysteries that novelists are investigating and you know, tell me if I'm wrong or not even near the mark, but I also think of you as a writer, a serious writer, who likes to investigate that question of how can we ever know? How can we ever know anyone? How do we know ourselves? How do we know anyone else, you know? It seems like so much is dependent on the context and the relationships at that time, and those Dublin Murder Squad mysteries, I think they would be a wonderful group of novels to teach in a psychology course you know, for that reason. That had to be in your mind as you were writing them, as you were structuring the arc of them that way. >> Tana French: Well, I didn't do it on purpose because I don't go ahead very well, but as I, no, as I got into it, as I realized that I wanted to do the kind of chain-link thing, that was definitely one of the things that drew me to it, because to me this is probably the core point of the arts, of any art, is that it gives you this chance to see the world, even for a brief glimpse, through someone else's eyes and to realize that this other person's reality is as vivid and as present and as real as your own. And that they're experiencing this world entirely differently and they're seeing you entirely differently from how you see yourself and every, every part of their existence is shaped by factors and seen through a lens that is not yours. And that's at the heart of every book is it's this glimpse into somebody else's world. And I really like the idea that by shifting from character to character, and also by having unreliable narrators which I do a lot, you suddenly realize that we're all seeing things through our own lens all the time and that the lens shifts, the lens changes, you know, the most over example is, there's a character called Scorcher Kennedy who is in Faithful Place, he's a supporting character, and he is this pompous rule-bound, up himself [inaudible] because that's what the narrator needs to see him as at that moment. And then he's the narrator of the next book and he's not like that, he has his reasons for sticking to the rules, they matter to him, he's damaged, he's in pain, and he needs those rules to hold himself together because he doesn't trust his own mind. And I liked doing that and going, the person who you think you see has reasons that you will never know, for being who he or she is. Has layers underneath that we may never understand. And you know, you're writing mysteries and the most fascinating and beautiful, painful, all of those things mystery of all, is the human mind, is other people. And so I think it's a, mystery is a really good genre to let you into touch on that mystery. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yes, yeah. When I think of Scorcher, I think of Broken Harbor and how that amazing setting of a housing estate that's gone bust, is such a wonderful you know, objective correlative to the way he is, he's broken too. That amazing landscape, you just, you keep coming up with or finding these settings in your novels that are so vivid and they're just, you know, it's a cliche but they are such a present character in the novel. Do you start with the settings, I mean do you have to have the setting in your head first, before you can-- >> Tana French: Yeah, yes, actually. Yeah, that is one of the few things I do have, I have like a clear sense of the main character, I have a really basic premise and I have a core setting. Because you're right, I love places and they feel very highly charged to me and I put this down to the fact that we moved around so much when I was a kid. So every place is sort of assisted with a phase of my life, very strongly, it's not that I've lived in the one place and it's got all the different phases of my life. I kind of associate different phases of my life with these different places. So they seem, they feel in memory, very charged up with all those experiences and I think that kind of led me to see places that way. Very deeply charged with the experiences of people who have lived with them and having a presence, a force almost, of their own. And I think that kind of seeps out in my books. >> Maureen Corrigan: It does, it absolutely does. Tana, you just spoke very powerfully to really what a writer can do, which is to bring to life someone who is not them. And to step very, into that character's mind and history and make them available to us, the readers. I'm just coming off of an academic year where it seems like every class I taught, 85% of our conversations were about identity, understandably given the year that we've had in this country, Black Lives Matter, the Trump presidency, all of that, and so I'm selfishly asking you a question that I wondered about with a lot of writers; are there any characters who you feel, as a writer, you don't have the right to inhabit? >> Tana French: Ah, interesting one. Okay, I'm a big believer in the idea that we shouldn't stick to ourselves. This goes against the whole idea of, again, what the arts are about to me. The idea that I can only write about a 40-something, third culture kid who's wound up in Ireland as a writer. That's absolutely anathema to everything I believe about the arts. But if that's said, if you're going to write somebody who's not you, you better make sure that you have some kind of in depth understanding of what it is like to be that person and that you have spent an awful lot of time listening to people who have that experience. So I think there are a lot of experiences that I couldn't write, definitely not as, you know, from within, from first person or as a protagonist, because there are not enough years in my life for me to spend enough time listening that I would understand that experience well enough to do it justice. I think the biggest one for me has been writing Toby the narrator in The Witch Elm, who's suffering from a brain injury and who has been broken, pretty much, physically and mentally by this brain injury. And I went, if I'm going to write this, I had better spend a lot of time listening to people who have gone through this. Because I'm writing about something real, that has had a huge impact on many people's lives and I would want to get that right. So I spent a lot of time reading everything on forums for people who we're going through traumatic brain injury, acquired brain injury, trying to understand, it wasn't just that I wanted to ask people questions, because if you ask questions of people, you're only asking what you want to hear, whereas you need to be hearing what it is that they want to say. So I spent a lot of time just reading, just reading people's experiences and what was unexpected to them and what was important to them. Hoping that I would bloody do this justice, because if you're going to take on something like that, you would want to do it right, and I have had a couple of people who either they or family members have acquired brain injuries, say yes, that is true to what it's felt like. And that was a huge relief. Because yeah, if you're going to take on something that isn't your experience, isn't your identity, you better be ready to do enough listening to do it justice, and there will be places where you can never, there's not enough time in your life to do enough listening to do it justice. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah, that's, that's, that's a wonderful answer, it's an answer I'm going to mull over, you know? Given all of the debate this year in classes. But I, as a reader, my greatest pleasure is stepping into the shoes of people who are not me. I mean, sometimes I like to see familiar places and emotions in what I read, but I also like to go outside of myself, which I guess brings us back to the beginning of our conversation where we were talking about pandemic literature and how you get outside of yourself through reading. I want to ask you one more question, because your many, many fans will be angry if I don't ask, what's next? What can we expect from you next? >> Tana French: I am a little kind of wary about even saying this because I was so, I was so thrown like everybody else by the pandemic, I hadn't realized really quite how much of writing is your subconscious working away and doing the job for you. And like everybody else, so much of this year, like I haven't had a subconscious, it's just been this smoking wasteland [inaudible], so I feel like a wimp. Everybody else is out there doing their job and I'm going-- [ Inaudible ] Pull it together! Stop being such a precious little [inaudible] flower. But no, I didn't get an awful lot of writing done this year, but I have got stuck back into it the last while, and I seem to be, although I'm still a bit dodgy about even saying it, unexpectedly writing a sequel to The Searcher, which was not the plan. >> Maureen Corrigan: Oh interesting. >> Tana French: But I realized for one thing that I had really enjoyed spending time with these people in this world and for another thing, there were more sweets in the pinata basically, felt like there was more story, there was more story there. >> Maureen Corrigan: Yeah, yeah [inaudible]. >> Tana French: I wanted to know what would happen next, so I felt like those characters might have a bit more story. So I'm starting on that and hopefully getting somewhere with it. >> Maureen Corrigan: Oh terrific, I think that's, that's terrific. Good, good. Well that's a teaser for everyone. >> Tana French: It's early days. >> Maureen Corrigan: Thank you so much for this conversation, Tana. It's been such a treat to talk with you and thank you for all the books all these years. Long may they continue. >> Tana French: Oh, thank you, I will keep writing as long as you guys will keep reading. And thank you so much for doing this, it's been absolutely lovely and I so appreciate it. >> LeVar Burton: We hope you've enjoyed this conversation, and now we'd like you to hear more from the library's own experts on this topic. >> Barbara Bair: Welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm joining you today from the Thomas Jefferson Building. I am Barbara Bair, and I am a historian in the Manuscript Division. The Manuscript Division is one of several special collections divisions in the Library of Congress. I oversee manuscript materials in the areas of literature, culture, and the arts. The Manuscript Division is home to the papers of many writers, including poets, novelists, philosophers, and theorists. We have popular culture writers too, including materials about the thrillers of Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, Don't Look Now, and the Birds, and the Ken McCormack papers. And writers of westerns, like Owen Wister and Dean Brown. In the hard-boiled fiction genre, the standout collection is the papers of James M. Cain. Cain and his friend, Raymond Chandler, author of the Big Sleep, featuring private eye, Philip Marlowe. Both straddled the worlds of fiction writing and Hollywood screenwriting. Several Cain novels were made into films, including Double Indemnity, for which Chandler wrote the screenplay with Billy Wilder, the Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce, featuring a standout performance by Joan Crawford. Raymond Chandler wrote to James M. Cain on Paramount Pictures letterhead in 1944, to say he was so worn out by working on screenplays, he was taking a break in the desert. He congratulates Cain that Warner Brothers has picked up Mildred Pierce, prizes the positive response to Double Indemnity, and talks about the different between writing dialog for a novel versus a film. In the record copy of his response, Cain writes back to say, he agrees about the challenges in redoing dialog and he prizes Chandler's work in the adapted screenplay. In 1946, Cain writes to Joan Crawford at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, to wish her good luck at that evening's Academy Awards in which she won the Best Actors Award for Mildred Pierce. She write a week later to thank him for his impact on her life. Cain's editor, Alfred A. Knopf, meanwhile had written to Cain in 1934 to warn him that after the success of Postman, the tough or hard-boiled label critics had applied to him as a writer of psychological crime novels set in urban landscapes, might stick. And he was right, it did. The papers also include galley proofs for the Postman Always Rings Twice, with it's opening account of the drifter soon to encounter ill fate. Come enjoy more in the James M. Cain papers for yourself, or visit the library's Motion Pictures Division for more examples of crime fiction, thrillers, and western novels adapted to film, many of them on the National Film Registry. [ Music ]