Books with author Raymond Chandler

Crime fiction master Raymond Chandler's fifth novel featuring Philip Marlowe, the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times). In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister, a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret lure private eye Philip Marlowe into the less than glamorous and more than a little dangerous world of Hollywood fame. Chandler's first foray into the industry that dominates the company town that is Los Angeles.

In The Simple Art of Murder, which was prefaced by the famous Atlantic Monthly essay of the same name, noir master Raymond Chandler argues the virtues of the hard-boiled detective novel, and this collection, mostly drawn from stories he wrote for the pulps, demonstrates Chandler's imaginative, entertaining facility with the form. Included are the classic stories "Spanish Blood," Pearls Are a Nuisance," and "Guns at Cyrano's," among others.

In The Simple Art of Murder, which was prefaced by the famous Atlantic Monthly essay of the same name, noir master Raymond Chandler argues the virtues of the hard-boiled detective novel, and this collection, mostly drawn from stories he wrote for the pulps, demonstrates Chandler's imaginative, entertaining facility with the form. Included are the classic stories "Spanish Blood," Pearls Are a Nuisance," and "Guns at Cyrano's," among others.

Crime fiction master Raymond Chandler's fifth novel featuring Philip Marlowe, the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times). In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister, a movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret lure private eye Philip Marlowe into the less than glamorous and more than a little dangerous world of Hollywood fame. Chandler's first foray into the industry that dominates the company town that is Los Angeles.

This is a collection of early short stories and an essay which gave the book its name. The latter is fairly short and its main idea is an argument for the virtues of a noir mystery as opposed to a traditional British one. Considering the fact that this comes from a guy who became a classic of the former even before his death and that he picked up some below the average examples of the latter, I agree.The stories themselves left me out cold for the most part. I can actually describe the plot in practically all of them at once. A trouble starts involving a damsel in distress. A tough guy emerges (usually a PI or a good cop) who gets involved, gets knocked out, and shot at. It turns out the damsel in distress is a minor culprit which makes her a femme fatale. Everybody and their brother meet at the main villain place, a big shootout is insured. Everybody dies except for the tough guy with a heard of gold and the femme fatale who emerge unscratched; the latter escapes. The end.

Chandler, Raymond (1950). Trouble is My Business. Vintage Books, 1988.Chandler, Raymond (1962). Raymond Chandler Speaking. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker, eds. Houghton Mifflin. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-520-20835-3.Chandler, Raymond, (1969). Forward by Powell, Lawrence Clark. The Raymond Chandler Omnibus, Borzoi Books.Day, Barry, (2015). "The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words". Vintage Books.Hiney, Tom (1997). Raymond Chandler: A Biography. Grove Press.Pronzini, Bill; Jack Adrian (eds). (1995). Hard-Boiled, An Anthology of American Crime Stories, Oxford University Press.In his introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of four of his short stories, Chandler provided insight on the formula for the detective story and how the pulp magazines differed from previous detective stories:The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.Chandler also described the struggle that writers of pulp fiction had in following the formula demanded by the editors of the pulp magazines:As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.[21]Critics and writers, including W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh and Ian Fleming, greatly admired Chandler's prose.[8] In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming said that Chandler offered "some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today".[22] Contemporary mystery writer Paul Levine has described Chandler's style as the "literary equivalent of a quick punch to the gut."[23] Chandler's swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett, but his sharp and lyrical similes are original: "The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel"; "He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips"; "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts"; "I went back to the seasteps and moved down them as cautiously as a cat on a wet floor." Chandler's writing redefined the private eye fiction genre, led to the coining of the adjective "Chandleresque," and inevitably became the subject of parody and pastiche. Yet the detective Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical tough guy, but a complex, sometimes sentimental man with few friends, who attended university, who speaks some Spanish and sometimes admires Mexicans, and who is a student of chess and classical music. He is a man who refuses a prospective client's fee for a job he considers unethical.The high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, he wrote, "The thing that rather gets me.

The Lady in the Lake is a 1943 detective novel by Raymond Chandler featuring the Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe. Notable for its removal of Marlowe from his usual Los Angeles environs for much of the book, the novel's complicated plot initially deals with the case of a missing woman in a small mountain town some 80 miles (130 km) from the city. The book was written shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and makes several references to America's recent involvement in World War II

The Little Sister is a 1949 novel by Raymond Chandler, the fifth in his popular Philip Marlowe series. The story is set in late 1940s Los Angeles. The novel centers on the little sister of a Hollywood starlet and has several scenes involving the film industry. It was partly inspired by Chandler's experience working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and his low opinion of the industry and most of the people in it.

The Lady in the Lake is a 1943 detective novel by Raymond Chandler featuring the Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe. Notable for its removal of Marlowe from his usual Los Angeles environs for much of the book, the novel's complicated plot initially deals with the case of a missing woman in a small mountain town some 80 miles (130 km) from the city. The book was written shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and makes several references to America's recent involvement in World War II

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 the only friend he can trust: private investigator Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is willing to help a man down on his luck, but later Lennox commits suicide in Mexico and things start to turn nasty. Marlowe is 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 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.