Maybe nostalgia indeed is what is used to be. This week the wayback machine’s new release shelf offers a history of avocado kitchens and earth shoes and more “Me Decade” data, while Tom Brokaw, in effect, hears the colors and sees the sounds of those long, strange ‘60s days of political and social change.

Extending back to include pre-boomer interests, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, is an examination of one the most influential crime novelists and his unconventional marriage to a woman 18 years his senior. Their marriage survived against all odds and may have been the crucial factor that led to the creation of Philip Marlowe, that icon of American culture. Author Judith Freeman looks to be pretty comprehensive — but though I could be wrong, I have my own version of how the Chandlers might have met:

                                IT'S NOIR OR NEVER

“Mr. Chander? Raymond Chandler?” She pled with a familiarity that bred contempt. “I need your services,” she continued. “My name is Miranda Wright.”

She was arresting, with hair the color of amber waves of grain and big blue eyes like spacious skies. Nothing about her was plain, fruited or otherwise, and God shed his grace further by throwing her more curves than the Grapevine to Gorman. From the arc of her appraising brow to the arch supporting a shapely ankle, she had enough curves to make a cubist put a boot through a Braque. Hairpin curves, bell curves, parabolic curves, logarithmic curves, curves such that the sums of the distances from each point in their periphery from two fixed points are equal. Every square inch of Miranda was curves.

There had to be an angle.

“Let me guess,” I sighed. “You’re the small-town starstuck crazy kid with a crazy tinsel town dream mixed up with small-time hoods and murder. You’re the boozehound floozy mixed up with a pin-jabbing gambler who's mixed up with racketeers, a gangster’s moll, and murder. You’re the snob-column society swell descended from the first lungfish that crawled ashore Plymouth Rock mixed up with a mixed-up black sheep heir who’s mixed up in blackmail and murder. If any of that’s not a match, it’s a mishmash, or a mix and match of a mess, Miss. But I won’t fix your mix-ups — much missed, matched, mishmashed, or mix-matched.”

“Why won’t you?” she demanded.

“It doesn’t add up,” I figured, nonplussed. “Whatever the case, in case I take your case, I’ll be out in no time flat and up to my neck in head saps and stiffs breathing down my neck.” I gave her the once-over twice. “And just maybe you’ll double cross me.”