In his dreams, Raymond Chandler could conjure tales as unsettling as some of his greatest novels, as if haunted by the spirits of Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe.
“Nightmare,” a brief and rarely seen sketch published this week in The Strand Magazine, finds the author of “The Long Goodbye,” “Farewell, My Lovely” and other crime fiction classics imagining himself in prison “somewhere” for a murder he does not remember committing. His cellmates include two men he knows nothing about, a pregnant woman named Elsa, and a piano in the corner that must be played lying down after “nine o'clock.”
