If you're going to read Chandler - and you should - you might as well get it all in one place, so these Library of America volumes are all you really need.

I need to find someone who writes prose this well today.

About twenty years back I tried to read Raymond Chandler but never, ever cracked the book. Being a fan of neo-film noir, I knew I would like it if I ever started. What I didn't know was that I would discover the lost world of my father. While Chandler was born in the late nineteenth century, my father was born in 1919 so the diction, thoughts, and mannerisms of these works are from father's milieu more than Chandler's. The hoods, jazz cats, and dicks of Chandler's stories are the future Greatest Generation of World War II. The LA of these stories is a boom town of oil, the studio system, and decadence that money and power breeds in a new frontier. These works are smoke-filled, bigoted, misogynistic, bloody - and exciting.

The book contains thirteen pulp stories including "The King in Yellow". This reference to "The King" shows that while Chandler was creating with Dashiell Hammett the hard-boiled detective genre, he also was aware of the work of other pulp writers such as H.P. Lovecraft's expansion of Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers' 19th century Cthulhu mythos. That story's detective and jazz enthusiast, Steve Grayce's fleeting reference: "The King in Yellow. I read a book with that title once..." alerts the reader that Steve has fallen from grace or the sanity of a normal man. He is living on borrowed time. In general, these stories paint a world of dames, broads, hustlers, gamblers, playboys, and enforcers both legal and illegal, and all of them are corrupted by the lure of fame and money.

The book finishes with his first three novels: "The Big Sleep", "Farewell, My Lovely", and "The High Window". Each of them suffers from the feeling of being a double or triple version of his short stories - solutions come in multiples. Yet, you can't help but like the fully developed, chain smoking, alcoholic Philip Marlowe. His legacy has come down to us through the adoption of film noir trops by Cyberpunk works like Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" and William Gibson's "Neuromancer". In Larry McLafferty's book, "Storming the Reality Studio", he and Richard Kadrey's "Cyperpunk 101: A Schematic Guide" says this:

"The Big Sleep" (Raymond Chandler, 1939, Random House). Chandler's smooth, polychromatic prose style and vision of the detective as knight-errant has influence more than one cyberpunk."

And of course, it is why we read Chandler. We know that while many will die, most of them will deserve it but that Marlowe will perhaps save the innocent or at least the redeemable. For despite all of his street smarts he is still a force of good and a protector of the weak. These stories are quests for a better world where Might still serves Right.

The PG Wodehouse of Hardboil.

"I felt terrible. I felt like an amputated leg."
"The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest."
"I wasn't doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling."

Chandler's concern with mood to the point of cannibalizing plot points word-for-word and leaving plot holes is incredible (but you wouldn't notice). Top 10-ish despite some of the seedier plot elements.

I really enjoyed reading Chandler's stories and first novels in order this way. The progress of his development as a writer and storyteller is obvious and quite interesting to track. I particularly liked the stories "Guns at Cyrano's" and "Pick-Up on Noon Street," and absolutely loved The High Window by the time I got to it. I'll definitely be moving on to Volume II.

This book includes stories from other books:

Pulp fiction (short stories)
- Blackmailers don't shoot
- Smart-Aleck kill
- Finger man
- Nevada gas
- Spanish blood*
- Guns at Cyrano's
- Pick up on noon street
- Goldfish
- Red Wind
- The king in yellow*
- Pearls are a Nuisance*
- Trouble is my business
- I'll be waiting*
* - also in the book: The simple art of murder

Full length books #1-3 Phillip Marlowe
1 - The big sleep
2 - Farewell, my lovely
3 - The high window

loved it

I EFFING LOVE CHANDLER, and I ADORE the Library of America collections of his writings.

It was quite an enjoyable experience to read this voluminous book of Chandler's writings, the first volume consisting of 13 short/pulp stories and his first three full-length novels, The big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The High Window.

Marlowe, the detective starring in the three novels , is being bullied and socked, cheated and manipulated by everyone, while at the same time drinking himself into oblivion and cracking wise to all and sundry. Despite that he is quite sharp and manages to somehow put everything in order, not to betray his client's trust in the process, while always keeping to his last remaining asset, his infallible integrity in a world gone dark.
Lastly, some of his thoughts and similes verge on the poetic, and many dialogues are truly witty/funny.

I only read The Big Sleep. I need to read another novel at least to have a more informed opinion.

Great stories, great writing, terrific collection in a quality edition—all 1200 pages of it. (The Reading Challenge should credit me for three books!)

These were fun reads. All the jargon of the 1930's was a hoot!