(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. Chandler's last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savor the unique and utterly compelling fictional world that made his works modern classics.

The Lady in the Lake moves Marlowe out of his usual habitat of city streets and into the mountains outside of Los Angeles in his strange search for a missing woman. The Little Sister takes Marlowe to Hollywood, where he tries to find a sweet...

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Raymond Chandler is an uncensored look at the tortured man who wrote the classic mystery novels The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Using recently uncovered archival materials, including personal papers and correspondence, biographer Thomas Hiney vividly evokes Chandler's early years in Nebraska, his education in England and on the corrupt streets of Los Angeles, and his later years as a novelist and screenwriter in the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. Along the way, he provides illuminating insights into the writer's inspirations and work --...

These papers brings together the correspondence and other previously uncollected writing of America's undisputed master of crime fiction and creator of the iconic private eye Phillip Marlowe, revealing aspects of the artist's powerful personality and broad intellectual curiosity. "For the Chandler fan, "The Raymond Chandler Papers" ... is a treasure-trove."--David Lehman, The "New York Times Book Review"

Born in Nabraska of Irish Quaker parents, educated at Dulwich College, and in the 'mean streets' of Los Angeles about which he wrote, Raymond Chandler - writer, oil executive, poet, recluse, and charmer - was full of contradictions as his origins. This biography puts Chandler's writing in the context of the crime and corruption in Prohibition LA.