While I should be writing

… Picture Post is for people who move their lips when they read. Surely they can get anything they want to know about me from my English publishers, Hamish Hamilton Ltd. The questions you quote from them would seem to me to indicate the intellectual level of the editorial department of Picture Post.

Yes, I am exactly like the characters in my books. I am very tough and have been known to break a Vienna roll with my bare hands. I am very handsome, having a powerful physique, and I change my shirt regularly every Monday morning. When resting between assignments I live in a French Provincial chateau on Mulholland Drive. It is a fairly small place of forty-eight rooms and fifty-nine baths. I dine off gold plates and prefer to be waited on by naked dancing girls. But of course there are times when I have to grow a beard and hole up in a Main Street flophouse, and there are other times when I am, although not by request, entertained in the drunk tank in the city jail.

I have friends from all walk of life. I have fourteen telephones on my desk, including direct lines to New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Santa Rosa. My filing case opens out into a very convenient portable bar, and the bartender, who lives in the bottom drawer, is a midget. I am a heavy smoker and according to my mood I smoke tobacco, marijuana, corn silk and dried leaves. I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes. I get my material in various ways, but my favourite procedure consists of going through the desks of other writers after hours. I am thirty-eight years old and have been for the last twenty years. I do not regard myself as a bad shot, but I am a pretty dangerous man with a wet towel. But all in all I think my favourite weapon is a twenty dollar bill.

Raymond Chandler, the master of letter writing, to his Hollywood agent, who I’m sure was very greatful for his answers.

The real reason for our Iowa roadtrip: the impossible task of finding Broken Wheel, existing somewhere out there in my imagination amongst the corn in southwestern Iowa.

The closest we could come was Clarence, Cedar County. So we drove past Cedar Rapids, past prosperious small towns with white fences, large houses, golf courses (!) and three curches. “This must be Hope”, Carina said and I was inclined to agree with her. Honestly, a golf course?

So we kept going. The corn fields replaced each other, silos came and went, a train rail suddenly appeared and with it, large freight trains that passed by every other ten minutes.

We arrived at Clarence. It’s basically just a Mainstreet, surrounded by a few streets lined with trees. Half of the stores are closed; there’s a lawyers office that doesn’t seem to be doing all that good, and a café that’s open four hours a day, wednesday through sunday.

The diner is a bar and is not called Grace’s. In stead, it has some sort of racing theme, with a torned checkered flag. Everyone in Clarence seem to be here on a Saturday. We buy coffee and drink it on the bench just outside.

A local keeps us company. He seems to have start drinking at breakfast. “I’m somewhat of a local historian”, he tells us. “My wife use to tease us for it. But this used to be a great town to grow up in. My mom could give me some dollars and send me of on my bike to the store to get bread. Who does that nowadays? And there were stores. We used to have three gas stations! And now? One.”
“What does people do around here?”
“Hard to say. Lot’s of people commute. It’s more of a sleeping town.”
It’s a quarter to six. The evening sun is shining over corn. Freight towns are passing. We drink weak coffee and the local and I smoke a cigarette.
“It used to be different”, he says. “Nowadays we’re hardly a thousand people here and most of the stores are closed.” He nods to himself and takes a step to the side, wobbly. “I love to talk about how this town used to be.”
Me and Carina gets ready for the final goal of the day: taking a photograph of us amongst the corn. You can’t come all the way to Iowa and not photograph yourself amongst the corn. But before we go, we have to check out his car. We admire it as should be and say things like what a good deal he made, and when we leave he tells us again how nice it was that we stopped by. “Very nice!” he says again. “You should come back soon.”

And who knows? Why not?

A few minutes later we find our corn, and we find a broken wheel. Carina thinks it must be a sign. Clarence in Cedar County, and a broken wheel at that. I think it’s one of those times in life when the line between fiction and reality becomes blurred; like standing on King’s Cross Station and seeing platform 9 3/4, or being happily in love and imagining sunsets on the beack.

Or standing in the corn fields in the evening sun in a make believe completely real town in south western Iowa and see Grace and Sara and George and Tom and know that they exist out there somewhere, living happily ever after.