Typed letter signed ("Ray"), to his agent H.N. Swanson ("Dear Swanie"), discussing sales of The Long Good-bye and the possibility of Philip Marlowe appearing on television: expressing scepticism at the offer of a TV show ("...shows of this type are so bad that I'm not sure the author isn't a loser in the long run unless he makes a hell of a big score, like Dragnet. God knows that can be silly enough, but at least it pays real money. If CBS were doing a show from a story of mine they might get careless and leave in two or three lines of my dialogue, but if they are just building something with a character named Marlowe, they will not be handicapped by any inadvertent touch of intelligence...I'd like a TV show, who wouldn't but not on any terms CBS would agree to. And if I got the kind of show I would like, it would probably flop. The private eye as such is dated. If you can't give him character and interest as a human being, you are licked. And TV can't. It hasn't the time or the talent and it is too much afraid of offending some jerk in Corn Center, Nebraska..."), and complaining at the American sales of The Long Good-bye ("...The English edition of The Long Good-bye has 35,000 copies in print of which 23,000 were definite sales when I last heard. If they could sell my books like that over here I'd have a sale of 75,000...But they can't and until they find a way to publish books at a price which bares some relation to what the reader gets for his money, they won't. It's like TV and the movies. TV stinks to heaven and even the halfwits admit it, but it doesn't cost anything, and you don't have to put a shirt on and get the car out and find a place to park and sit in a badly ventilated theatre with the stink of popcorn turning your stomach..."), one page, 4to, on art deco Raymond Chandler headed paper, La Jolla, 7 January 1954