Raymond Chandler Books

Later Novels and Other Writings begins with The Lady in the Lake (1943), where Marlowe's search for a missing businessman's wife leads him from L.A.'s gritty streets to the serene mountains, exploring themes of loneliness and loss. The darker tone of Chandler's later work is evident in The Little Sister (1949), featuring an ambitious starlet, a blackmailer, and a naive young woman from Kansas, culminating in a harsh critique of Hollywood and a scathing portrayal of the city. The Long Goodbye (1953), Chandler's most ambitious novel, delves into the complexities of friendship and the compromises of middle age, revealing deeper layers of the Marlowe character. Playback (1958), originally a screenplay, marks Chandler's last novel. This volume also includes Chandler's long-unavailable screenplay for the film noir classic Double Indemnity (1944), adapted from James M. Cain's novel. Additionally, a selection of essays, including "The Simple Art of Murder," offers insights into Chandler's pulp roots, his distinctive hero, and style, while eleven letters provide a witty and sardonic glimpse into his thoughts on writing, publishing, and filmmaking.

Raymond Chandler’s first three novels, published here in one volume, established his reputation as an unsurpassed master of hard-boiled detective fiction.The Big Sleep , Chandler’s first novel, introduces Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralyzed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail, and murder. In Farewell, My Lovely , Marlowe deals with the gambling circuit, a murder he stumbles upon, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women. In The High Window , Marlowe searches the California underworld for a priceless gold coin and finds himself deep in the tangled affairs of a dead coin collector.In all three novels, Chandler’s hard-edged prose, colorful characters, vivid vernacular, and, above all, his enigmatic loner of a hero, enduringly establish his claim not only to the heights of his chosen genre but to the pantheon of literary art.Featuring the iconic character that inspired the forthcoming film Marlowe , starring Liam Neeson.

Adapted from the James M Cain novel by director Wilder and novelist Raymond Chandler, this title tells the story of an insurance salesman, played by Fred MacMurray, who is lured into a murder-for-insurance plot by Barbara Stanwyck, in an archetypal femme fatale role. schovat popis

The Long Good-bye: The High Window; PlaybackThe Chandler-Marlowe prose is a highly charged blend of laconic wit and imagistic poetry set to breakneck rhythms... Its strong colloquial vein was a revolution in language as well as subject matter.... Marlowe liberated his author's imagination into an overheard democratic prose which is one of the most effective narrative instruments in our recent literature... Chandler's novels focus his hero's sensibility, and could almost be described as novels of sensibility. Their constant theme is big city lonliness and the wry pain of a sensitive man coping with the roughest elements of a corrupt society. It is Marlowe's doubleness that makes him interesting: the hard-boiled mask half-concealing Chandler's poetic and satiric mind Ross MacDonald

Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel 'The Big Sleep' in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures - is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The detective's iconic image burns just as brightly in 'Farewell My Lovely', on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner. And the inimitable Marlowe is able to prove that trouble really is his business in Raymond Chandler's brilliant epitaph, 'The Long Goodbye'.

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.

Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. Chandler’s last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savor the unique and utterly compelling fictional world that made his works modern classics.The Lady in the Lake moves Marlowe out of his usual habitat of city streets and into the mountains outside of Los Angeles in his strange search for a missing woman. The Little Sister takes Marlowe to Hollywood, where he tries to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother, uncovering on the way a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more than enough murder. In The Long Goodbye, a case involving a war-scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife has Marlowe constantly on the move: a psychotic gangster’s on his trail, he’s in trouble with the cops, and more and more corpses keep turning up. Playback features a well-endowed redhead who leads Marlowe to the California coast to solve a tale of big money and, of course, murder.Throughout these masterpieces, Marlowe’s wry humor and existential sense of his job prove yet again why he has become one of the most recognized and imitated characters in fiction.

This comprehensive collection features the complete works of a renowned detective literature master, bringing together stories that have not been accessible for many years. It offers readers a chance to explore both classic tales and rare gems, showcasing the author's unparalleled skill in crafting suspenseful narratives. This edition serves as a definitive resource for fans and newcomers alike, celebrating the legacy of a pivotal figure in the genre.

'I don't know why the hell I write so many letters', Raymond Chandler once mused to a correspondent. 'I guess my mind is just to active for its own good'. This title presents some of the hundreds of letters Chandler wrote - many of them composed during long, insomniac nights. It also contains anecdotes of Hollywood.