Rejoined in the Grave?

Last month, in a brief note, we mentioned that there’s an effort underway to finally--after a half-century delay--reunite the late detective novelist Raymond Chandler with his beloved wife of 30 years, Cissy. When Chandler died in 1959 (almost five years after his spouse), he was buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego, California. Meanwhile, the urn containing Cissy’s remains was stored not far away, in the Cypress View Mausoleum.

Getting these two back together is turning out to be a complicated venture, as novelist Mark Coggins (The Big Wake-Up) points out in a new piece in The Huffington Post:

There is every reason to believe Chandler intended for [Cissy] to be buried with him when he died, but his will did not address the issue, and no one who knew of his wishes was involved in the funeral arrangements. As a result, the urn has sat on a shelf in a storage room at the mausoleum with other unclaimed urns for fifty-six years.

To lay Cissy’s ashes to rest beneath Chandler’s gravestone requires petitioning the Superior Court of California, a task that’s already been undertaken by Loren Latker, a Chandler enthusiast and master of the Web site Shamus Town. However, as Coggins observes, “the odds of the court approving the request are low without written documentation of Chandler’s wishes, so Latker has set up this page on his Web site to publicize the case and solicit supporting e-mails from the public to use in the court hearing.”

Such e-notes can be sent either directly to Latker himself, or to his attorney, Aissa Wayne.