His stories aren't nearly as good as his novels, but most of them are still worth a read.

Thanks, Angelina! I felt as if I were in a smoke filled room, martini in hand, black lace dress, Clark Gable across the room…

Raymond Chandler is one of my favorite authors. I didn't realize he had written so many short stories. Anyone wanting to tackle this book be sure you have plenty of time because it is a thick book. It took me a week total to get through it. Of course, I have vision problems so the small print held me up a bit. The stories are in true Chandler fashion, and I discovered he had more Private Detectives than Philip Marlowe. Definitely a Raymond Chandler enthusiast book to read.

Did not finish - Nothing wrong with the book; I just wasn't in the mood for 1300 pages of hard-boiled crime. Will pick this one up later.

This hefty volume is 1300 pages of Raymond Chandler at his best. Having read all of his novels, and knowing that Chandler preferred his novels over his short stories, I approached this with limited expectations. However, I was wrong. These stories are terrific. If you’re a Chandler fan, get this book.

"We grinned at each other, a couple of nice lads getting along in a harsh, unfriendly world."

The plots are often a little derivative, overwrought or formulaic.... and it doesn't matter a jot.

Chandler's writing is just exquisite. These noir shorts are pure mood pieces. They're raw atmosphere - sustained consistently across the 1,200+ pages.

The writing is mean, efficient, and so compact you could don't always notice the skill. The dialogue is terse, sardonic, delivered with a snarl - endlessly quotable.

- I poured her a slug that would have made me float over a wall.... she put hers down like an aspirin and looked at the bottle... "this stuff dies painless with me," she said. "It never knows what hit it."

- "you didn't insult me yet," he said. "Nature beat me to it, handsome."

- Mrs Prendergast gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

You can pick up this book and dive in at random, and you're straight back into the noir landscape that Chandler summons so well.

Sensational writing.

(note: the two magical stories in the collection don't really work for me, and aren't why we're here. The gothic romance at the end of the collection is a nice wistful diversion though).

What can you say about an author who defined an entire genre? He wasn't the first to write hard-boiled mysteries, but I would argue he remains the best nearly 60 years after his death. No one does it better than Chandler, simply because he is an excellent writer. Had he turned his hand to any other genre, he'd have been the best at that, but fortunately for us, he chose to write pulps. He's renowned for the novels, but wrote quite a few long short stories/novellas which are equally enjoyable, although I think Marlowe is the best of all his detectives. There are only 25 stories in this very fat volume, which is an indication of how long they are. (I wish they had broken into two volumes, as it's tough to read the beginning and end without dropping the book - at least it has a built-in bookmark)

The fast and tough pace of his writing belies the careful structure and planning he put into all his stories. Every single word advances the plot or develops the characters. And he captured the slang of the era so marvelously. Who but Chandler could write "She had a face that would make bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window"? You can almost identify the author by the turn of phrase.

It's no surprise that his books were so frequently adapted into films, because his cinematic style brings the California of the mid-century so marvelously to life. You can just picture the dives, the gin joints, the cheap hotels, and the strange airy glamour of the canyons before the housing boom, the ranch houses and bungalows, the rain-slicked streets of the cities.

Sensitive readers may be alarmed at the racial epithets throughout the book, certainly they were more socially acceptable in mid-century California than they are today, but let's keep in mind that this is fiction, the characters are fictional, and if one refers to black men as "dinges," we can't assume that Chandler also did so.

The big news with this volume is the inclusion of "The Pencil," the last Marlowe story, and "English Summer," a strange somewhat Gothic romance. Neither is quite up to Chandler's usual standards. "The Pencil" has all of Marlowe's trademarks but somehow the era itself is wrong. It's just too late for the private dick; somehow the reader is glad that Marlowe didn't persist throughout the turbulent 1960s. "English Summer" doesn't have that page-turning, pot-boiling suspense that Chandler did so well. There is a bad woman, of course, and a man who loves her, but not much else going on.

But the bona fide detective stories in this book are not to be missed. If you are a fan of the genre and like the novella format, this is a perfect read.

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, dipping in and out to make it last longer! Here you can read the stories that are embryonic novels and immerse yourself in the hard-boiled and film noir world of the 40s and 50s. There are also a couple of stories that don't fit that mould, equally well written and rich inm character and dialogue.

The novels are better.

Definitely hard boiled.

Mostly of historical interest for stories containing the seeds of Chandler's novels - beginnings, plots and characters that would appear in The Lady in the Lake, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye - but it also contains some departures from his usual style into comedy and fantasy.

His stories develop from meat and potatoes pulp to hilarious and tragic dissertations on human experience, many times traversing the same subject matter and chewing it over with more humor, more pained love and hate and grit each time.