Could be.(I guess I have to stop blaming Raymond Chandler's drinking for how "The Lady In The Lake" turned out...I'm very sober right now and lose the thread ALL THE TIME.)If you don't know the story, apparently they were working on the script for "Lady", and they called Chandler all frantic..."So, who killed her?" They say Chandler said he didn't know.

That sounds exactly like the Big Sleep story. That dude never knew who killed anyone.

I don't think that that was ever the point for him, no, but now I'm wondering if he did it twice, or if we just heard it about different books.

Oaky, what if she's dead because of some drug issue--killed by a dealer she owed money to. Maybe she told him she was gonna trade him the masters of the album for a large debt But she lied and doesn't have them and he killed her. he could be a dealer/music fan, so when our hero meets him, it could make a good scene.

Oo, Scrappy the plot whisperer! I am totes going to hit you up sometime.

That could work, too, because that's how she got them in the first place. I'll have to cogitate about that.(/inner Boyd Crowder)

Nothing I love more than "what if..." sessions!

Could there be someone else in pursuit of the tapes for other reasons? Suppose there was someone else who had worked on the album who everyone thought was dead. Maybe the tapes included clues as to what happened to him. Or suppose there was a murder and the murderer knows that some part of the murder or the argument leading to it might have accidentally been recorded during a session. Or perhaps the rights to very popular song had been contested in court for years and the tapes might show who had really written it.

A paper I'm criticizing used a footnote to falsely accuse someone of distorting the contents of a paper cited. Citing a paper as saying something it does not is a major academic sin. So now I find myself using a footnote of my own to point out that the original citation can be backed up by the contents of the papers cited, and it was the accusation of distortion that actually distorts the contents. And probably the right thing to do. But conducting a dispute in footnotes feels - I dunno, like me and the person I'm criticizing should be at a high tea, sniping verbally at one another. Or perhaps conducting a duel at dawn with pistols that need to be reloaded after every shot.

Thanks for all the thoughts. It's easier for me to write things before I have to make a lot of decisions and stick with them(as a writer, I'm like Windows that way, I think.)