The Birds on the Wing

Get this and get it straight. Crime is a sucker's road and those who travel it wind up in the gut of the prism of the grave. They dressed in red, white and blue and jumped from an ancient biplane at 3,500 feet, twice a day every day and nobody worried.

Until five million bucks went along just for the laughs, and death went along for the ride. From the pen of Raymond Chandler, outstanding author of Crime Fiction comes his most famous character in... The Adventures of Philip Marlow.

Now, with Gerald Moore's star, this is Philip Marlow, we bring you tonight's exciting story, The Birds on the Wing. It had been the kind of quiet, worthless week that speaks well for human beings and their relations with one another, but doesn't do much for a private detective's bank balance.

So when it exactly noon, the telephone call ejecting me out of Chandler's new novel, Little Assistant. And a voice aged with anxiety, it dangled a hundred bucks worth of negotiable bait my way. I had snapped at it.

Then I wondered if I'd done the right thing. Because it had been my most haddy Pembroke, guardian of the millionaire, thrill-seeking screwball page Pembroke. And now an hour later I left the sunlight and felt my way into the gloom of the carefully tucked away Hollywood bar, where she had suggested we meet.

When I could see again, I spotted her at a corner table. That the old girl would be the other side of 50 and doing a little too much of the disguise it, I had expected.

But that she would be drinking her whiskey neat, I hadn't. When I approached her and introduced myself, she started to come right to the point, but didn't quite make it. How rude of me! I'm sorry, you're probably dying for a drink.