Raymond Chandler

"With his classic novels and stories featuring the hardboiled private detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler transformed the detective story and became one of the most iconic and imitated writers of the twentieth century. But despite the fame he attained through best-selling books such as The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, as well as the screenplay for such groundbreaking film noir as Double Indemnity, he remained an intensely private man throughout his life. As he lived a quiet existence darkened by his wife's recurring illnesses and his struggles with alcoholism, Chandler's letters were his sole connection to his friends, fans and publishers - and fellow writers from Ian Fleming to Somerset Maugham.". "In The Raymond Chandler Papers, Chandler biographers Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane bring together a new selection of his correspondence - much of it never before made public - that reveals all aspects of his powerful personality, artistic sensibility, and broad intellectual curiosity."--BOOK JACKET.

An insurance salesman and an unhappy wife conspire to murder her husband and collect his insurance policy.

Philip Marlowe's on a case: his client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband's collection. That's the simple part. It becomes more complicated when Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. That's also unlucky for a private investigator, because leaving a trail of corpses around LA gets cops' noses out of joint. If Marlowe doesn't wrap this one up fast, he's going to end up in jail – or worse, in a box in the ground ...

Stories and Early Novels includes every story that Chandler did not later incorporate into a novel - thirteen in all. Drawn from the pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective, these stories show how Chandler adapted the violent conventions of the pulp magazines - with their brisk exposition and rapid-fire dialogue - to his own emerging vision of 20th-century America. Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels contains a newly researched chronology of Chandler's life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.

Down-and-out drunk Terry Lennox has a problem: his millionaire wife is dead and he needs to get out of LA fast. So he turns to his only friend in the world: Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator. He's willing to help a man down on his luck, but later, Lennox commits suicide in Mexico and things start to turn nasty. Marlowe finds himself drawn into a sordid crowd of adulterers and alcoholics in LA's Idle Valley, where the rich are suffering one big suntanned hangover. Marlowe is sure Lennox didn't kill his wife, but how many more stiffs will turn up before he gets to the truth?

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 LA all the way to a murky mountain lake ...

Excerpts from the works of Raymond Chandler juxtaposed to photographs of Los Angeles.

A private detective is hired to break up an unsuitable romance, find a missing dog, solve a murder, search for an ex-con's lost girlfriend, ransom a necklace, and investigate a wife's mysterious disappearance.

Tough-minded and typically idiosyncratic, here is Chandler on Chandler, the mystery novel, writing, Hollywood, TV, publishing, cats, and famous crimes. This skillfully edited selection of letters, articles, and notes also includes the short story "A Couple of Writers" and the first chapters of Chandler's last Philip Marlowe novel, The Poodle Springs Story, left unfinished at his death. Paul Skenazy has provided a new introduction for this edition as well as a new selected bibliography. --Publisher description.