Hard-boiled detective fiction at its best- Raymond Chandler's best loved novel published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.
Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but moved to England with his family when he was twelve, where he attended Dulwich College, alma mater to some of the twentieth century's most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler died in 1959, having established himself as the finest crime writer in America.
Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised
up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and
rebellious
*The New York Times Book Review*
Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and
America has never looked the same to us since
*Paul Auster*
Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude
*Erle Stanley Gardner*
[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we
realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of
not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a
vision
*New York Review of Books*
Raymond Chandler is a master
*New York Times*
Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye
*Los Angeles Times*
Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner.
. . A great artist
*The Boston Book Review*
Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first
sentence
*Daily Telegraph*
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