These are just plain fun.

Absolute A+ This is a must have book for anyone interested in writing. Contained in a single volume are: four amazing novels (The Long Goodbye may be his greatest work), a screen play written with Billy Wilder for James Cain's Double Indemnity, Chandler's wildly abusive and wonderful essays on writing, and select letters (which are formidible and long and full of appropriate amounts of self doubt to make even the weakest among us take heart).

Have fun! - Watch the movie after reading the book... The Lady in the Lake is a loo-loo, but Altman's Long Goodbye is a fascinating neo-noir. Double Indemnity is a classic - I love how they meet in the grocery store and talk to the cans near each other! Thank you Library of America.

More like an averaged out "4.5 out of 5" rating, but hey, who's counting.

Let's just rank this:

5 stars:
1) The Long Goodbye (also, arguable, Chandler's masterpiece)
2) Double Indemnity (co-writer, Billy Wilder)
3) The Lady in the Lake (just a sensational murder mystery with a bevvy of awesome supporting characters)

4 stars:
4) The Little Sister (certainly one of the three great openings to any book ever)
5) Playback (slight, but also includes many great insights; a significant and thoughtful-minor work if that makes sense)

The other selected writings are good too, especially the one about writing in Hollywood I especially love this little passage:

"Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made." Period. Boom. There's the entire state of Hollywood right now (and for a long time) in two sentences.

I might not have read every single of the letters, but no matter. Chandler's non-fiction writing gives a good sense of the man: intellectual, thoughtful, and not someone to suffer fools lightly.

absolutely fantastic example of detective fiction. every line marlowe spits out is self-depricating, witty, and sassy as all get out. dirty, fun fiction.

Lady in the Lake & The Little Sister are good, but The Long Goodbye is brilliant. Some of the essays at the end made me laugh out loud.

Fuller review later. Not quite 5 stars... mostly because Playback was just awful.

I have read this and the earlier stores anthology several times, I am a big fan of Chandler’s work. I remember getting these two volumes and was so excited to read them both. Chandler’s prose style really brings you into the stories, the tension and mystery is palpable.

If you enjoy crime fiction and you want to go back to one of the masters of the genre this two book anthology has everything you need to get hooked on Chandler.

Just a quick note: this review only applies to the story I just finished reading in this collection, “The Long Goodbye,” not the entire collection.
I’ve read two of the other novels in this collection previously.
Like all of Chandler’s mysteries, this one is gritty, filled with great prose, convoluted and complex… But even given the fact that his stories wind and twist in so many unexpected ways, there’s a real twist at the end I just did not see coming.
This particular story also opens the door for a later story that Chandler only wrote four chapters for before passing away, and then it was completed eventually by Robert B. Parker (“Poodle Springs”) and published in 1989. That novel was later made into a TV movie featuring James Caan as Philip Marlowe.
But back to this story: if you’re a Chandler fan, this novel will not disappoint. It has everything you’ve come to expect in a Philip Marlowe detective story.

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