I don't seem to have any very definite ideas about books yet, except possibly that if I do another detective story, it will have to be something that stands a good chance of serialization. There just isn't enough in it otherwise. Look at this last book [Farewell, My Lovely]. It had good reviews, some very good; it had a fair amount of indirect publicity in addition to your own very extravagant efforts; it rated 98 per cent on Bretano's popularity list; it was five or six weeks on the Chicago bestseller list of mysteriesÉ;it was on two or three local bestseller lists of fiction and runner up on one national list; it is being bought by the public libraries, which The Big Sleep was not. Yet in spite of this it has not sold very well. So what the hell? You might say the title was wrong, but if I can believe what I hear, that could only have affected the mystery trade and that is too small anyhow. You might say it was too tough, and I might agree with you, but that doesn't prove that sweetness and light would have helped.

To me the essence of the thing is that, apparently, the moment you label a book "mystery" all you emphasize is excitement, and the general reader is more or less deliberately frozen off from considering it. I'd like to take a look at a list of mysteries that have sold more than 5,000 copies in the last five years. I have a hunch they could be counted on the fingers of the Two-Toed Sloth. And if this hunch is wrong, I should certainly like to know the answer. I have read a lot of mystery novels and almost without exception they were poor stuff, or seemed so to me. . . .

If this book sold 10,000 copies, I might have been kidded into the idea that I had a future. As it is I can't help feeling that this particular medium is about the fanciest way of wasting one's talents that I could have hit on. . . .