Raymond Chandler, pictured in 1948 with his black Persian cat Taki. He referred to the pet, who lived with the family for 20 years, as his 'secretary' because he sat with him as he wrote
Born in Chicago in 1888, Raymond Chandler became a detective fiction novelist and later a screenwriter after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression.
He described his pet cat Taki, who lived with the family for 20 years, as his 'secretary' in a 1945 letter to literary critic James Sandoe.
He wrote: 'I call her that because she has been around me ever since I began to write, usually sitting on the paper I wanted to use or the copy I wanted to revise, sometimes leaping up against the typewriter and sometimes just quiet gazing out of the window from a corner of the desk, as much as to say, "The stuff you’re doing’s a waste of my time, bud".'
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