Collected Stories: Raymond Chandler (Everyman's Library CLASSICS) - Hardcover

Chandler, Raymond

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9781857152579: Collected Stories: Raymond Chandler (Everyman's Library CLASSICS)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857152573 ISBN 13: 9781857152579

Publisher: Everyman, 2002

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The only complete collection of shorter fiction by the undisputed master of detective literature, assembled here for the first time in one volume, includes stories unavailable for decades. When Raymond Chandler turned to writing at the age of forty-five, he began by publishing in pulp magazines such as Black Mask before later writing his famous novels. In these stories Chandler honed his art and developed his uniquely vivid underworld, peopled with good cops and bad cops, informers and extortionists, lethally predatory blondes and redheads, and crime, sex, gambling and alcohol in abundance. In addition to his classic detective fiction – in which his signature atmosphere of depravity and violence swirls around cool, intuitive loners such as Philip Marlowe – Chandler turned his hand to fantasy and even a Gothic romance. This rich treasury of twenty-five stories shows him developing the laconic, understated style that would serve him so well in his later masterpieces, immersing readers in the richly realized fictional universe that has become a part of our literary landscape.

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Review:

"Raymond Chandler is a master." -New York Times

"Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence." -Ross Macdonald

"Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since." -Paul Auster

"The prose rises to heights of unself-conscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action-tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision...The reader is captivated by Chandler's seductive prose." -Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

"Chandler is one of my favorite writers. His books bear rereading every few years. The novels are a perfect snapshot of an American past, and yet the ruined romanticism of the voice is as fresh as if they were written yesterday." -Jonathan Lethem

"Chandler seems to have invented our post-war dream lives-the tough but tender hero, the dangerous blonde, the rain-washed sidewalks, and the roar of the traffic (and the ocean) in the distance...Chandler is the classic lonely romantic outsider for our times, and American literature, as well as English, would be the poorer for his absence." -Pico Iyer

About the Author:

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to England with his family when he was twelve. He attended Dulwich College, Alma Mater to some of the twentieth century's most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later by his first novel. The Big Sleep introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the often imitated but never-bettered hard-boiled private investigator.

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