A brand-new BBC Radio full-cast dramatization by Stephen Wyatt of a classic Raymond Chandler mystery featuring private eye Philip Marlowe. Derace Kingsley’s wife ran away to Mexico to get a quickie divorce and marry a Casanova-wannabe named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband insisted. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it, he denies everything and sends the private investigator packing with a flea lodged firmly in his ear. But when Marlowe next encounters Lavery, he’s denying nothing – on account of the two bullet holes in his heart. Now Marlowe’s on the trail of a killer, who leads him out of smoggy L.A. all the way to a murky mountain lake. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 February 2011.
Author
Stephen Wyatt was educated at Latymer Upper School and then Clare College, Cambridge. After a brief spell as Lecturer in Drama at Glasgow University, he began his career as a freelance playwright in 1975 as writer/researcher with the Belgrade Theatre Coventry in Education team. His subsequent young people's theatre work includes The Magic Cabbage (Unicorn 1978), Monster (York Theatre Royal 1979) and The Witch of Wapping (Half Moon 1980). In 1982 and 1983 he was Resident Writer with the Bubble Theatre for whom he wrote Glitterballs and The Rogue's Progress. Other theatre work includes After Shave (Apollo Theatre 1978), R.I.P Maria Callas (Edinburgh Festival / Hen and Chickens 1992), A working woman (from Zola's L'Assommoir) (West Yorkshire Playhouse 1992) and The Standard Bearer (Man in the Moon 2001). He also collaborated with Jeff Clarke on The Burglar's Opera for Opera della Luna (2004) "stolen from an idea by W. S. Gilbert with music nicked from Sir Arthur Sullivan". His first work for television was Claws, filmed by the BBC in 1987, starring Simon Jones and Brenda Blethyn. Wyatt then went on to write two scripts for the science fiction series Doctor Who—these were Paradise Towers and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Both of those serials featured Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. His other television credits include scripts for The House of Eliott and Casualty. He has worked for BBC Radio since 1985 as both an adapter and an original playwright.
