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Collected Stories

raymond chandler john bayley

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(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

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

1299 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1959

This edition

Format
1299 pages, Hardcover
Published
October 15, 2002 by Everyman's Library
ISBN
9780375415005
ASIN
0375415009
Language
English
Characters More characters
  • Philip Marlowe

    Philip Marlowe

    Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandlers early short stories, published in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured ...

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About the author

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raymond chandler

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Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.
The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list. The latter novel was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field. In it he wrote: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held."

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Rating(4 / 5.0, 73 votes)
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73 reviews All reviews
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DiamondDimoDaddy
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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With this volume, I've read all of Mr. Chandler's fiction and most of his nonfiction. This one's got all of his short stories, some of which were embiggened to become novels, others were robbed of scenes and plot threads to help fill out novels, and some are, well, some are just horrid highlights of his racist, misogynist, homophobic nature.

I love his writing style. Few people, I feel, match him when it comes to descriptions of nouns (people, places, things) or when it comes to the witty stichomythia. It wasn't until I read his novels through for the second time that I realized, he's not the greatest at plots. His style is good enough to make up for that. But, as much as I like his writing, I dislike the man equally.

Like I said, he's steeped deeply in all the -isms. While he was a product of his time, I'm not willing to forgive him for it. Nor am I willing to forget about his writing. See, Mr. Chandler is my most treasured example of being human. Far too often we hold up artists, sports stars, politicians, to unrealistic ideals. By ignoring their flaws, or unreasonably defending them, we do everyone a disservice. So I don't defend him when I come across an ignorant description or a terrible slur.

Because this collection showed me how far his writing skills developed and how stagnant his prejudices stayed over the course of his career.
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TomoeRebecca
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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It is said that Chandler himself said that he cannibalised his short stories to write [some of] his novels. With this in mind, and having just recently read all seven of his [completed] novels back-to-back, I thought it'd be interesting to see just what exactly was borrowed/lifted from the short stories, and to what extent.

Out of the 25 stories included here, and except for a few character name changes and minor plot thread adjustments to connect the different stories (re-)used, 2 (or 3) stories were, um... blatantly recycled for each of the following Chandler novels: The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and The Lady in the Lake. Even the title for this last one was recycled!!

The Lady in the Lake is probably my favourite Chandler novel (closely followed by Farewell, My Lovely), so re-reading them - or parts of them - I didn't mind so much at all.

But what about the other stories? Well, there's some really good stuff in here, and some things you definitely would not expect from Raymond Chandler. For instance, one story (The Bronze Door) involves a huge magical (bronze) door, and anyone (or anything) that crosses its threshold just... disappears. With its plot and humour, this is the kind of story I'd expect to find in a Mark Twain anthology (for example: The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain - yet another Everyman's Library book), certainly, but we can agree that Chandler and Twain are not exactly in the same market, and that's what makes it a welcome surprise.

If you've read the three Chandler novels mentioned above, there's still plenty in here for you. This massive, 1299-page beast is anything but. The stories are so good, the pages practically turn themselves (it seems I could not avoid the oft-recycled cliché). It's a beautiful hardcover from the Everyman's Library series published by Alfred A. Knopf, and at the low price you can get it online from, say, Amazon - well, it's practically a crime NOT to get this book.
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kasumi_imai
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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Just picked this up. Really enjoyed reading Chandler on the train rides to/from work last winter. Don't know why, since the stories always seem to be set in southern Cal, but reading him during the winter felt like a good fit. Sort of like I can only listen to Van Halen during the summer. So I'll look forward to picking this up in 4-6 months, I'm guessing...
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La_BigTreee
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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Although perhaps accurate to the time in which it is set, there is too much random killing, and EVERYONE is drinking way too much. I read probably 1/2 of the short stories and never found one that was engaging! Lots of deals under the table or off the radar, but I was never sure who was the good guy & who was the bad guy. I should have abandon it sooner!
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Ysbryd
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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One and a half stories in and I'm hooked. I've read that the early stories are not up to the later stuff and I suppose they are a bit more linier but the magic of the language and the description of scenes , people and action are very familiar. A thought - I think it's best to read the novels first - some later stories include plot points and scenes cannibalised for use in the novels and I think that might detract from their enjoyment. I haven't come to any of these passages yet but I imagine it won't have the same spoiler effect in a short story ... anyway - I'll see.
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galadriel_832
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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Really good read, with some better than others. Red Wind, Nevada Gas, Try The Girl were among the ones i can remember (at least the title) with I'll Be Waiting probably my favourite. A fun mixture of characters too. I'm glad for his novels they all became marlowe, but it was nice to have several options for the shorts. Not completely sure how i feel about his cannibalizing. If i had read the shorts first i probably wouldn't like it, but i knew beforehand novels were cannibalized. It was interesting to see the differences and such, with it being simple to line them up with their corresponding novel.

I was a bit overwhelmed by the end of it, i shall like to re-read it all, picking and choosing over a few weeks probably.
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juicestain77
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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I picked this up in the library of the Princess cruise ship Island Princess. The stories are long, very long, but they're classic Chandler, and it was fun to read stories that creative the foundation for his novels and for his narrator/protagonist, Phillip Marlowe.
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syaowee
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 16,2025
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It’s honestly a pretty draining prospect to read 26 Raymond Chandler stories. Here’s why: he was so remarkably consistent that the stories are thorough, thoughtful, a little repetitive–along a few common paths–, and they are long. Each of these stories is between about 45-60 pages (using Everyman Library pages at that), and so the grand total of 26 of his stories is about 1300 pages. And so I have been working on these a lot.

If there were more variety, I would be more excited by a lot of these, but there’s usually a murder, a blackmail, or an insurance scam. There’s Marlowe stories, which is great, and there are another set of stories using a different detective named Carmady, which is ok. And then there are the more random stories where Chandler creates a different world, which is the best.

Another goofy thing about the stories is how very detective! the stories are here. So for example the number of times the phrases “shamus” and “dick” are used is ridiculous. There’s also some uncomfortable racism thrown in against Mexicans, Black people, and Jewish people….so you know.

Anyway, the other thing I will tell you is that Chandler’s writing is very mature and polished from the get go. I think this is a result of his career not really getting started until he was in his mid-40s. In addition the stories are just not meant to be read in this format. They were published over about 10 years in a variety of magazines, and that difference in space and time I imagine that adds to their variety.
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