Come Together, Right Now, Over Me

There was much debate last year about the wisdom and necessity of reuniting detective novelist Raymond Chandler with his wife of 30 years, Cissy, in his San Diego, California, grave. But that debate ended yesterday--Valentine’s Day--when the urn containing Cissy’s remains was buried over her husband’s casket. As the Associated Press reported:

More than 100 literary fans watched Cissy Chandler’s ashes arrive at San Diego’s Mount Hope Cemetery in a caravan of 1920s-era cars as a Dixieland band played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The reverend from the Episcopal church in La Jolla that conducted the author’s funeral in 1959 presided over the ceremony, where a new grave marker commemorating their reunification was unveiled.

Among that ceremony’s attendees were Chandler historian Loren Latker; Aissa Wayne, an attorney and daughter of film star John Wayne, who helped make this reburial possible; and actor Powers Boothe, who starred in the mid-1980s HBO-TV series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, based on Chandler’s short stories.

The full AP account can be found here.