My favorites!

I have to sit down at the desk. Turn away from distractions and then let my characters talk. Sometimes to each other and sometimes to me. An edit pass is always a good warmup btw.

I got 3 in 1 day last week. 1 of them in less than an hour after I queried.

If life is a race did I pull ahead a little?

The Little Sister. Raymond Chandler

2, Paris and New York twice.

Mick Herron's Slow Horses series.
From the last century, Raymond Chandler's Lady in the Lake

Thanks for the reply!

Bumping off underdeveloped characters is easy enough, like pawns or lambs to the slaughter. Ruthlessness is required to kill off characters that your readers have become emotionally invested in but does that make one a murderer?