Raymond Chandler is the most influential mystery writer since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Judith Freeman is the first writer to examine in depth the strange relationship between Chandler and his much older wife, Cissy, as well as their peripatetic life together in and around Los Angeles. Freeman discussed her work in an interview from her home in California.

Q: Raymond Chandler has been imitated, parodied and practically plagiarized for so long that his style of detective story has practically become a cliche. Yet, somehow, the work not only survives but stays fresh. What do you think it is about Chandler that endures?

A: There's his humor for starters: As Christopher Isherwood observed, there's fun in Chandler. He's an immensely amusing writer, and readers connect with that wit.

And yet Chandler says some profound things about American society and the corruption in its institutions .... His books contain that quality he most valued in writing, namely vitality, but in the end I think it's Marlowe that gives the books their real staying power.

Philip Marlowe is an enigma. He says so himself at one point. He's vulnerable, like us, and we feel his sad good naturedness.

Q: Chandler certainly had mixed feelings about Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular. Yet he had many opportunities to move and never did. How would you sum up his strange on-again, off-again affair with the City of Angels?

A: He had a definite love-hate relationship with L.A. I think he loved it when he first arrived in 1913. He really took to driving and loved automobiles. But L.A. was a place that degenerated quickly. After a while it became Paradise Despoiled for him, a grotesque and impossible place to live. Still, he put it on the literary map.

Q: So many fine actors have played Philip Marlowe over the years, and Chandler lived long enough to have seen Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Montgomery play the part. Who was his favorite, and who is your own?

A: Chandler is on record as saying that he thought Dick Powell (in "Murder My Sweet," an adaptation of "Farewell, My Lovely") made the best Marlowe, but that was before he saw Bogart in "The Big Sleep." He did say that Bogart was "the genuine article." It's a tough call for me as to which Marlowe I prefer. I loved both Bogart and [Robert] Mitchum. I thought Elliott Gould was great, too, in "The Long Goodbye," the first actor to capture that sense of Marlowe's sexual ambivalence. It's clear that Marlowe will never die, and he provides a very malleable suit of armor for an actor to slip into.