He sat down at the dining table, with his drink and a lighted cigarette, and for more than an hour he wrote steadily in his neat individualistic hand. When he had finished, the complete synopsis of the story, with all relevant facts and avenues of inquiry, was there for the forthcoming G-Men to read. He signed it with his name, and below that he carefully sketched a skeleton figure crowned with a correctly elliptical halo.
He finished his drink while he read it over and put it down again and nailed it to the table with the pen. Then he lighted one more cigarette, put the rest of the pack in his pocket, and went out to his car.
He got in and drove to the so-called main road, and there without hesitation he turned to the right and drove away westwards — which was not the way to the Circle Y. He had the greatest admiration for the FBI, but they were liable to lead into formalities that he was too busy to be annoyed with.
He drove quickly, with the softness of Jean Morland’s lips on his mouth, and his heart singing.
II. Palm Springs
Introduction
Palm Springs, if anybody doesn’t know it by this time, is an oasis in the desert a little more than a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. When I first went there, the business district was about three blocks long and a block wide; there were about three hotels, much too big for the town, a reasonable number of homes, a few auto courts, and a dude ranch on the outskirts. Today the neon signs of the motels greet you miles out in the desert and escort you in unbroken procession to a main street as long as the whole village used to be when I first knew it, and the houses have spread way out where we used to ride after jackrabbits, and they have flowed all around the dude ranch on the other side, and then for about fifteen miles out on the highway beyond more villages or communities have sprung up in an almost uninterrupted chain to take advantage of the overflow that even this enlarged Palm Springs cannot swallow; I seldom go there anymore, because it is too different from the place I used to love.
But I spent six consecutive winters there in the good old days which ended at Munich, and it would have been strange if I had never set a story there.
The actual process of doing it, however, suffered some vicissitudes.
My first attempt was when RKO was making Saint movies. Thinking how pleasant it would be to work on a picture in my own favorite location, I cleverly suggested that we should make one called The Saint in Palm Springs. They liked the idea very much, and I went to work on the script. It turned out to be an excellent story; so naturally the producers (who always knew that they could have written much better Saint stories than I did, only they never got around to it) didn’t like it much. They hired various wizards to improve it, and did such a thorough job that the final script contained absolutely nothing whatsoever of mine except the title. I have never been able to guess why they flinched from that ultimate alteration, unless it was because they feared they might obscure the genius of the inspired executive who decreed that this epic should be shot at Palmdale, which is only a hundred and fifty miles away from Palm Springs.