Veintiséis relatos de un maestro. Todos en un volumen imprescindible. Philip Marlowe en estado puro. Todo el estilo de la novela negra, la que después pasa al cine y llega hasta nuestro días. La mujer enigmática, los tiroteos, el detective corrupto, la cuchitril donde sentado en una silla fuma y bebe Marlowe. Todo un clásico.

3.5. It took me forever to finish this. Not because it's boring, no, just because it has soooooo many pages. All this pulp fiction, I'm gonna tell you, I love it. And those mystery stories with fantasy elements are also pretty awesome.

My first time actually reading short stories, great experience- had read all of Chandlers novels and understood some of his ideas were repeated in the novels- glad I read the novels first. This was a fun read, but I may not read any more short stories for a while, it was the author and the way he described the physical situation that made this very interesting.

I've owned this collection for about 20 years, and re-read it occasionally. However, this was the first time I've read the whole thing right to the end. Before, I've left out the last three stories because I didn't want to live in a world without any more Raymond Chandler fiction. Curiosity finally got the better of me.

Having all of his short fiction, what is there to say about the contents?

As for the edition, I seems that, for a hardback, the pages are too small, which made it necessary for the publisher to bring it to 1200 pages. So what you have is a small, thick edition, which kind of makes it an awkward read.

The introduction is quite good, but not written by Chandler.

This is more of an observation than a review. So...here goes: Raymond Chandler is to the detective short story what Philip K. Dick is to the science fiction short story. They are both able to conjure up an entire world of people, places and characters within the confining walls of a short story.

I've read a lot of these short stories in Trouble is My Business and The Simple Art of Murder, but since this is a collection of all of Chandler's stories, I'm also not in a big hurry to read them all. Better to just read one when the mood strikes me, don't you think?

Παραμένω οπαδός της "μεγάλης φόρμας", αποφεύγοντας τα διηγήματα (παραξενιά μου, χωρίς ουσιαστική βάση!). Είπα όμως να κάνω μια εξαίρεση για έναν από τους μεγαλύτερους Στυλίστες του Νουάρ (και εν γένει): τον Ρ. Τσάντλερ.
Η έκδοση του Κέδρου (σε 2 μικρούς τόμους), περιέχει κάποιες πολύ ενδιαφέρουσες και χαρακτηριστικές ιστορίες, και άλλες όχι και τόσο, αν και η αναγνωστική απόλαυση είναι δεδομένη. Σε κάθε περίπτωση, πάντως, προτιμώ τα αξεπέραστα μυθιστορήματά του!

I only read about one and a half of the novellas in here this time, what with one thing or another.

Chandler is one of the founders of the hardboiled noir detective genre, and it’s just a great ride. We’ve got all the genre conventions—dangerous ladies, cranky detectives who get beat up and roll over and keep going, sketchy drug deals and counterfeiting and of course murder. The works.

Chandler is master of the pithy and witty description, like Wodehouse and Pratchett.

Language has shifted a LOT since his day and a lot of his slang hits different. Yikes!

Chandler never once that I saw referred to a non-white character without an insult attached.

A very interesting journey, watching Chandler's prose develop from his very first story (so chockablock with twists that the formula was painfully obvious) to his last (short) date with Marlowe in "The Pencil." I enjoyed this, especially when he stuck with what he knew: gritty, hardboiled crime/noir. He has 3 main detective characters: Philip Marlowe, Ted Carmady, and John Dalmas. They each have their own distinctive personalities and styles, so much so that I was surprised to see that the stories he based The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye on were not Marlowe originals, but rather featured Carmady. Same with the titular "The Lady in the Lake," originally starring Dalmas. I'm curious now to read the novels and see what differences pop up between the original shorts and the longer versions.

Chandler's wanderings weren't all high notes for me. He plays fast and loose with paranormal/supernatural in "The Bronze Door" and "Professor Bingo's Snuff," both of which were not that great, IMO. The comedy of "Pearls are a Nuisance" fell completely flat for me, and "English Summer: A Gothic Romance" lays on the goth with a thick-bladed trowel. To me, he's at his best in the world of California-set crime noir, a world he made his own right from the start.

A collection of repetitive, unclear, and unsatisfying short stories. The storylines are so monotonously similar that the titles could be switched without changing anything. Furthermore, the plots are so packed with characters and incident that it's hard to tell what's important, or even what's going on. It took me a while to realize that that these aren't really short stories at all, they're actually novels compressed into a few pages. Chandler as much as admitted this when he took several of them and remade them into novels. As a result, they fail as short stories. The much-vaunted Chandler prose is occasionally interesting, but overall this book just confirmed my opinion that this is another example of an author whose reputation outstrips his talent.

A neat collection that gathers up the stories left out of the Library of America edition. The omissions to that other book include the stories that Chandler "cannibalized" to write various novels, but they're still worth reading simply because they tend to end differently than the novels did and what Chandler changed from one version to the next is of interest. Fun highlights include "Professor Bingo's Snuff," "The Bronze Door," and "English Summer," none of which are detective stories per se, but continue to circle Chandler's preoccupations with murder, unhappy marriages, and crime in general. The first of those two are perhaps the most different of all the stories because of their supernatural elements which are handled rather matter of factly, just another thing someone might use to bump a guy off.