Books by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely

by Raymond Chandler

The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.

The Lady in the Lake

by Raymond Chandler

The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

In The Lady in the Lake, hardboiled crime fiction master Raymond Chandler brings us the story of a couple of missing wives—one a rich man's and one a poor man's—who have become the objects of Philip Marlowe's investigation. One of them may have gotten a Mexican divorce and married a gigolo and the other may be dead. Marlowe's not sure he cares about either one, but he's not paid to care.

The Long Goodbye

by Patti Davis, Raymond Chandler

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

The Long Goodbye

by Patti Davis, Raymond Chandler

Ronald Reagan’s daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimer’s disease. The simplicity with which she reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her feelings encompasses all the surprises and complexities that ambush us when death gradually, unstoppably invades life.

In The Long Goodbye, Patti Davis describes losing her father to Alzheimer’s disease, saying goodbye in stages, helpless against the onslaught of a disease that steals what is most precious–a person’s memory. “Alzheimer’s,” she writes, “snips away at the threads, a slow unraveling, a steady retreat; as a witness all you can do is watch, cry, and whisper a soft stream of goodbyes.”

She writes of needing to be reunited at forty-two with her mother (“she had wept as much as I over our long, embittered war”), of regaining what they had spent decades demolishing; a truce was necessary to bring together a splintered family, a few weeks before her father released his letter telling the country and the world of his illness . . .

The author delves into her memories to touch her father again, to hear his voice, to keep alive the years she had with him.

She writes as if past and present were coming together, of her memories as a child, holding her father’s hand, and as a young woman whose hand is being given away in marriage by her father . . . of her father teaching her to ride a bicycle, of the moment when he let her go and she went off on her own . . . of his teaching her the difference between a hawk and a buzzard . . . of the family summer vacations at a rented beach house–each of them tan, her father looking like the athlete he was, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and lean torso. . . . She writes of how her father never resisted solitude, in fact was born for it, of that strange reserve that made people reach for him. . . . She recalls him sitting at his desk, writing, staring out the window . . . and she writes about the toll of the disease itself, the look in her father’s eyes, and her efforts to reel him back to her.

Moving . . . honest . . . an illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease, and a woman and her father.

From the Hardcover edition.

All That Glitters: The Crime and the Cover-up

by Raymond Chandler

The uncle of the alleged victim in the Michael Jackson child sexual abuse scandal in 1993 discusses his young nephew's relationship with the superstar and the legal pursuit of the case against Jackson.

Killer in the Rain

by Raymond Chandler

Newly appointed Detective Inspector Gemma James has never thought to question her friend Hazel Cavendish about her past. So it is quite a shock when Gemma learns that their holiday retreat to a hotel in the Scottish Highlands is, in fact, Hazel's homecoming -- and that fellow guest Donald Brodie was once Hazel's lover, despite a vicious, long-standing feud between their rival, fine whiskey distilling families. And the fires of a fierce and passionate affair may not have burned out completely -- on Brodie's part at least, since he's prepared to destroy Hazel's marriage to win back his "Juliet." But when a sudden, brutal murder unleashes a slew of sinister secrets and long-seething hatreds, putting Hazel's life in peril, Gemma knows she will need help unraveling this very bloody knot -- and calls for the one man she trusts more than any other, Duncan Kincaid, to join her far from home ... and in harm's way.

The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

by Raymond Chandler

During a period of twenty years—from his start as a young writer for H. L. Mencken’s classic pulp magazine The Black Mask in the early 1930s, through the publication of his novels The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, to his career as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s—Raymond Chandler kept a series of private notebooks.
Drawn from those journals, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler offers an intimate view of the writer at work, revealing early ideas, descriptions, and anecdotes that would later be used in The Long Goodbye, The Blue Dahlia, and other classics.
Filled with both public and private writings, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler includes “Marlowesque” particulars such as pickpocket lingo, San Quentin jailhouse slang, a “Note on the Tommygun,” and musings on “Craps.” Here, too, are surprising, lesser known essays on Hollywood, the mystery story, British and American writing, and a wicked parody of Hemingway. This sampler—by turns whimsical, provocative, irreverent, and fascinating—also contains a list of possible story titles; “Chandlerisms;” and his short work “English Summer: A Gothic Romance,” which the writer viewed as a turning point in his career.

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window (Everyman's Library)

by Raymond Chandler

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.

The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words

by Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler never wrote a memoir or autobiography. The closest he came to writing either was in—and around—his novels, shorts stories, and letters. There have been books that describe and evaluate Chandler’s life, but to find out what he himself felt about his life and work, Barry Day, editor of The Letters of Noël Coward (“There is much to dazzle here in just the way we expect . . . the book is meticulous, artfully structured—splendid” —Daniel Mendelsohn; The New York Review of Books), has cannily, deftly chosen from Chandler’s writing, as well as the many interviews he gave over the years as he achieved cult status, to weave together an illuminating narrative that reveals the man, the work, the worlds he created.

Using Chandler’s own words as well as Day’s text, here is the life of “the man with no home,” a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, and the changing vernacular of the cultural psyche that resulted. Chandler makes clear what it is to be a writer, and in particular what it is to be a writer of “hardboiled” fiction in what was for him “another language.” Along the way, he discusses the work of his contemporaries: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham, and others (“I wish,” said Chandler, “I had one of those facile plotting brains, like Erle Gardner”).

Here is Chandler’s Los Angeles (“There is a touch of the desert about everything in California,” he said, “and about the minds of the people who live here”), a city he adopted and that adopted him in the post-World War I period . . . Here is his Hollywood (“Anyone who doesn’t like Hollywood,” he said, “is either crazy or sober”) . . . He recounts his own (rocky) experiences working in the town with Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and others. . .We see Chandler’s alter ego, Philip Marlowe, private eye, the incorruptible knight with little armor who walks the “mean streets” in a world not made for knights (“If I had ever an opportunity of selecting the movie actor who would best represent Marlowe to my mind, I think it would have been Cary Grant.”) . . . Here is Chandler on drinking (his life in the end was in a race with alcohol—and loneliness) . . . and here are Chandler’s women—the Little Sisters, the “dames” in his fiction, and in his life (on writing The Long Goodbye, Chandler said, “I watched my wife die by half inches and I wrote the best book in my agony of that knowledge . . . I was as hollow as the places between the stars.” After her death Chandler led what he called a “posthumous life” writing fiction, but more often than not, his writing life was made up of letters written to women he barely knew.)

Interwoven throughout the text are more than one hundred pictures that reveal the psyche and world of Raymond Chandler. “I have lived my whole life on the edge of nothing,” he wrote. In his own words, and with Barry Day’s commentary, we see the shape this took and the way it informed the man and his extraordinary work.

High Window

by Raymond Chandler

The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

A wealthy Pasadena widow with a mean streak, a missing daughter-in-law with a past, and a gold coin worth a small fortune—the elements don't quite add up until Marlowe discovers evidence of murder, rape, blackmail, and the worst kind of human exploitation.

"Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude." Erle Stanley Gardner

"Raymond Chandler has given us a detective who is hard-boiled enough to be convincing . . . and that is no mean achievement." --The New York Times

The Big Sleep (A Philip Marlowe Novel)

by Raymond Chandler

The renowned novel from the crime fiction master, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe. • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

A dying millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, and Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

“Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Little Sister

by Raymond Chandler

The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

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.

The Simple Art of Murder

by Raymond Chandler

The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the forthcoming film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson

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.

Trouble Is My Business

by Raymond Chandler

The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

This collection by crime fiction master Raymond Chandler features four long stories in which private eye Philip Marlowe is hired to protect a rich old guy from a gold digger, runs afoul of crooked politicos, gets a line on some stolen jewels with a reward attached, and stumbles across a murder victim who may have been an extortionist.

Raymond Chandler's Trouble Is My Business

by Raymond Chandler, Arvind Ethan David

A brilliant graphic adaptation of the classic Raymond Chandler novella featuring detective Philip Marlowe.

Los Angeles, 1930s. A rich old man who knows trouble when he sees it hires a detective agency to scare off a young woman who seems to be making his adopted son hemorrhage cash. Fortunately for the detective, a hard drinking man named Philip Marlowe, trouble is his business.

The young woman, Harriet, has an agenda all her own and aspirations beyond being a shill for a gambler. She's nobody's fool. Nor is the old man, for his part. He's got serious muscle--a chauffer with a degree from Dartmouth, the only Black student from his class, who knows his way around a gun and isn't afraid to use it.

Right in the middle of it all is a big pile of money. And when the bodies begin to drop, only Philip Marlowe can sort out which of these suspects is pulling the trigger.

The Big Sleep (Special Edition) (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Anniversary Edition)

by Raymond Chandler

A special edition of the iconic first novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, featuring Philip Marlowe, the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times). Featuring an introduction by James Ellroy.

A dying millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, and Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Special Edition.

The Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely

by Raymond Chandler

These two classic novels featuring private eye Philip Marlowe made Raymond Chandler's name synonymous with America's hard-boiled school of crime fiction. The Big Sleep was an instant success when first published in 1939. It centers around a paralyzed California millionaire with two psychopathic daughters; he involves Marlowe in a case of blackmail that turns into murder.

Farewell My Lovely, which Chandler regarded as his finest work, came out the following year. It has Marlowe dealing with the Los Angeles gambling circuit, a murder he stumbles upon, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women.
"Chandler writes like a slumming angel and invests the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence," said Ross Macdonald. And George V. Higgins wrote: "Chandler is fun to read. He's as bleak as tundra, and his dirtbag characters far outnumber his stellar citizens, but Philip Marlowe is a laconic tour guide through a zoo of truly interesting animals."

Raymond Chandler's Marlowe: The Authorized Philip Marlowe Graphic Novel

by Raymond Chandler

Elegantly designed and packaged in a mix of full color and black and white comics, this trio of graphic novels includes Chandler's classic final Marlowe adventure, "The Pencil," adapted from the Raymond Chandler story by award-winning mystery novelist Jerome Charyn and Marvel/DC comics illustrator David Lloyd; "Goldfish," adapted by top British designer Ryan Hughes and "Trouble is My Business" illustrated by Lee Moyer, Alfredo Alcala in a style reminiscent of 30s illustrator J.C. Leyendecker. None of this work has ever been published before and represents the first adaptations of these Chandler stories into comics.

The Annotated Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

The first fully annotated edition of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 classic The Big Sleep features hundreds of illuminating notes and images alongside the full text of the novel and is an essential addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

A masterpiece of noir, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep helped to define a genre. Today it remains one of the most celebrated and stylish novels of the twentieth century. This comprehensive, annotated edition offers a fascinating look behind the scenes of the novel, bringing the gritty and seductive world of Chandler's iconic private eye Philip Marlowe to life. The Annotated Big Sleep solidifies the novel’s position as one of the great works of American fiction andwill surprise and enthrall Chandler’s biggest fans.

Including:
-Personal letters and source texts
-The historical context of Chandler’s Los Angeles, including maps and images
-Film stills and art from the early pulps
-An analysis of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in the novel

The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

by Raymond Chandler

The World of Raymond Chandler shows how Chandler precariously balanced the values of a classical English education against those of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War; how he adopted Los Angeles as his home after WWI, with Hollywood in turn adopting him (and adapting his works); how his detective hero and alter ego Philip Marlowe evolved over the years; and, above all, what it is to be a writer, and in particular one writing in the “other language” of hardboiled fiction.

Acclaimed biographer and historian Barry Day deftly interweaves images and text, using quotations from Chandler’s novels, short stories, letters, and interviews, to craft a unique portrait of the mystery writer’s life and times.

Philip Marlowe's Guide to Life

by Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler’s classic gumshoe Philip Marlowe is the quintessential American detective. His effortless masculinity, smoldering sexuality, and verbal fleetness remain the embodiment of cool. He liked liquor, women, and working alone. And, in a world defined by betrayal, mistrust, and double-dealing, Marlowe’s rough exterior belies an unshakable code of honor. Taken together, his observations and witticisms represent some of the most scathing and brilliant writing in crime fiction, and coalesce into a wonderfully alluring worldview: a vision of unswerving righteousness, accountability, and stylish conduct in a sea of turpitude and injustice.

Philip Marlowe’s Guide to Life is an elegant, A–Z compendium of Marlowe’s ever-more-relevant observations about crime, women, work, sex, good, evil, and life in the big city. Chandler’s genius transcended genre; though he seemed to single-handedly invent noir, his work ventured beyond it into an idiom all its own, and he left behind a legacy of grit and disarming beauty. Here is a brilliant and loving tribute to that legacy, sure to delight fans old and new.

Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels: Pulp Stories / The Big Sleep / Farewell, My Lovely / The High Window (Library of America)

by Raymond Chandler

In Raymond Chandler’s hands, the pulp crime story became a haunting mystery of power and corruption, set against a modern cityscape both lyrical and violent. Now Chandler joins the authoritative Library of America series in a comprehensive two-volume set displaying all the facets of his brilliant talent.

In his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the classic private eye finds his full-fledged form as Philip Marlowe: at once tough, independent, brash, disillusioned, and sensitive—and man of weary honor threading his way (in Chandler’s phrase) “down these mean streets” among blackmailers, pornographers, and murderers for hire.

In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Chandler’s personal favorite among his novels, Marlowe’s search for a missing woman leads him from shanties and honky-tonks to the highest reaches of power, encountering an array of richly drawn characters. The High Window (1942), about a rare coin that becomes a catalyst by which a hushed-up crime comes back to haunt a wealthy family, is partly a humorous burlesque of pulp fiction. All three novels show Chandler at a peak of verbal inventiveness and storytelling drive

Stories and Early Novels also includes every classic noir story from the 1930s that Chandler did not later incorporate into a novel—thirteen in all, among them such classics as “Red Wind,” “Finger Man,” The King in Yellow," and “Trouble Is My Business.” Drawn from the pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective, these stories show how Chandler adapted the violent conventions of the pulp magazine—with their brisk exposition and rapid-fire dialogue—to his own emerging vision of twentieth-century America.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Raymond Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings: The Lady in the Lake / The Little Sister / The Long Goodbye / Playback /Double Indemnity / Selected Essays and Letters (Library of America)

by Raymond Chandler

With humor, along with an unerring sense of dialogue and the telling details of dress and behavior, Raymond Chandler created a distinctive fictional universe out of the dark side of sunlit Los Angeles. In the process, he transformed both crime writing and the American language.

Written during the war, The Lady in the Lake (1943) takes Philip Marlowe out of the seamy L.A. streets to the deceptive tranquility of the surrounding mountains, as the search for a businessman’s missing wife expands into an elegy of loneliness and loss. The darker tone typical of Chandler’s later fiction is evident in The Little Sister (1949), in which an ambitious starlet, a blackmailer, and a seemingly naïve young woman from Manhattan, Kansas, are the key players in a plot that provides fuel for a bitter indictment of Hollywood and Chandler’s most savage portrayal of his adopted city.

The Long Goodbye (1953), his most ambitious and self-revealing novel, uncovers a more anguished resonance in the Marlowe character, in a plot that hinges on the betrayal of friendship and the compromises of middle age. Playback (1958), written originally as a screenplay, is Chandler’s seventh and last novel.

A special feature of this volume is Chandler’s long-unavailable screenplay for the film noir classic, Double Indemnity (1944), adapted from James M. Cain’s novel. Written with director Billy Wilder, it is one of the best screenplays in American cinema, masterful in construction and dialogue. Supplementing the volume, and providing a more personal glimpse of Chandler’s personality, is a selection of letters and essays—including “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which Chandler muses on his pulp roots and on the special qualities of his hero and style.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

None

Raymond Chandler: The Library of America Edition (Library of America, 79-80)

by Raymond Chandler

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

With these words, private eye Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s great literary creation and one of the most enduringly popular characters in American fiction, first took life seventy-five years ago. Here, for the first time in a deluxe collector’s box, are all seven Philip Marlowe novels—The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window; The Lady in the Lake; The Little Sister; The Long Goodbye; and Playback—along with thirteen classic pulp stories, Chandler’s brilliant screenplay for Double Indemnity, and a selection of his revealing essays and letters: the most comprehensive edition of the hard-boiled crime fiction of Raymond Chandler ever published.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler Introduction by John Bayley

by Raymond Chandler

The only complete edition of stories by the undisputed master of detective literature, collected here for the first time in one volume, including some stories that have been unavailable for decades.

When Raymond Chandler turned to writing at the age of forty-five, he began by publishing stories in pulp magazines such as “Black Mask” before later writing his famous novels. These stories are where 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 hard-boiled stories–in which his signature atmosphere of depravity and violence swirls around the cool, intuitive loners whose type culminated in the famous detective Philip Marlowe–Chandler also turned his hand to fantasy and even a gothic romance.

This rich treasury of twenty-five stories shows Chandler developing the terse, laconic, understated style that would serve him so well in his later masterpieces, and immerses the reader in the richly realized fictional universe that has become an enduring part of our literary landscape

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback Introduction by Tom Hiney

by Raymond Chandler

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.

Featuring the iconic character that inspired the forthcoming film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.

Poodle Springs

by Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker

When Raymond Chandler died in 1959, he left behind the first four chapters of a new Philip Marlowe thriller. Now three decades later, Robert B. Parker, the bestselling creator of the Spenser detective novels, has completed Poodle Springs in a full-length masterpiece of criminal passion.

"More than just an impressive homage, this is a first-rate detective novel with all of the suspense, action, and human drama that we have come to expect from the best."--Playboy

Philip Marlowe is alive and well and living in Poodle Springs, California. He's married to a wealthy heiress now. But living in the lap of luxury hasn't made a dent in Marlowe's cynicism--or his talent for attracting trouble. Soon he's on a trail of greed, lust, and murder as dark and cunning as any he's ever seen. Philip Marlowe is back in business.

"Raymond Chandler fans, throw away your dog-eared copies of The Big Sleep...Philip Marlowe has returned!"--Milwaukee Journal