DS, two pages, 8.5 x 11, July 15, 1953. Television contract between author Raymond Chandler and CBS Television, with the former agreeing to allow the latter to “make an adaptation and dramatization” of the work entitled “I’LL BE WAITING,” to be broadcast on the dramatic anthology series Danger. Signed at the conclusion in ink by Chandler, who adds his initials to two amended sections on the first page. In fine condition.
Written in 1939, ‘I’ll Be Waiting’ is the shortest of Chandler’s stories; it is also the first—and only—one published in a ‘slick’ magazine. Nearly all his previous works of short fiction had been published in the pulps Black Mask and Dime Detective, but Chandler wrote one for the Saturday Evening Post at the behest of his agent and was motivated primarily by the money such magazines paid.
Afterward, he seems to have worried that he sold out. That year he expressed disappointment in a letter to another pulp writer, George Harmon Coxe: ‘I didn’t think much of the story when I wrote it—I felt it was artificial, untrue and emotionally dishonest like all slick fiction.’ Even 20 years later, in a letter to detective writer William Gault, he acknowledged that while ‘I’ll Be Waiting’ had been ‘anthologized to death’ and the ‘story was all right,’ he preferred the free-spirited form of the pulps to the constraints in tone and substance imposed by glossy magazines.
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