Raymond Chandler and Taki

By the time he wrote The Big Sleep, created Philip Marlowe, and became one of America’s best-known crime writers, Taki was still there supervising.

In a 1945 letter to The Atlantic Monthly editor Charles Morton, Chandler introduced her as his 14-year-old secretary, the cat who had been around him ever since he began to write.

…usually sitting on the paper I wanted to use or the copy I wanted to revise, sometimes leaning up against the typewriter and sometimes just quietly 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.” Letter to Charles Morton, March 19, 1945 · via Letters of Note

Sometimes she became more argumentative. She would talk back for minutes at a time, and Chandler suspected the whole performance amounted to a fairly sarcastic editorial review: “You can do better.”

He couldn’t understand cats, he admitted, despite having loved them all his life.

Taki, on the other hand, seemed perfectly capable of understanding people.

Chandler noticed that she could immediately identify visitors who liked cats. She ignored anyone who didn’t, while walking straight up to complete strangers who genuinely did. Even then, she wasn’t particularly needy. She accepted a reasonable amount of attention and moved on.

He described her as poised, intelligent, and equipped with an extraordinary memory. When Raymond and his wife, Cissy, traveled, Taki came with them. She remembered places she’d visited before and generally settled back into them as though she’d never left.

Taki also made it clear that the Chandler household didn’t need another cat. Raymond and Cissy once found a stray kitten in the desert and tried to bring it home. Taki became so furious that she made herself sick.

The kitten had to stay in the garage until the Chandlers could find it another home. Leaving Taki herself behind wasn’t much easier.

After one trip, Chandler wrote that she had knocked the cook’s glasses from her face while they were away. When the Chandlers returned, Taki spat at Raymond and refused to speak to them for two days.

As Taki got older, her demands increased. If she found herself alone, she would yell until someone came. She expected to be lifted onto and down from her sleeping table. Her warm milk was served at eight in the evening, but she usually started asking for it around 7:30.

Chandler called her “positively tyrannical.” He continued doing what he was told.

Taki passed away in December 1950, at nearly 20 years old.

Chandler and Cissy were devastated. Writing to a friend several weeks later, Chandler initially described them as a little upset by the death of their black cat. Then he corrected himself. Calling them “a little upset,” he explained, was merely conventional distance. For them, losing Taki had been a tragedy.

She had been there almost as long as Chandler had been a writer: sitting on drafts, traveling with him, judging visitors, and demanding her milk half an hour early. For someone he jokingly employed as his secretary, Taki had a remarkably long tenure.

Less than a year later, they took in another black Angora who looked so much like her that they named him Taki too.