The Big Sleep and Other Novels

Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel “The Big Sleep” in 1939. Marlowe’s entanglement with the Sternwood family – and an attendant cast of colorful underworld figures – is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The detective’s iconic image burns just as brightly in “Farewell My Lovely”, on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner. And the inimitable Marlowe is able to prove that trouble really is his business in Raymond Chandler’s brilliant epitaph, “The Long Goodbye”.

Praise for Raymond Chandler “Raymond Chandler is a master.” —”The New York Times” “\[Chandler\] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.” —”The New Yorker ““Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.” —Robert B. Parker, “The New York Times Book Review ““Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.” —“Los Angeles Times “Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.” —”The Boston Book Review “Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler’s prose. . . . He wrote like an angel.” —”Literary Review “\[T\]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.” —Joyce Carol Oates, “The New York Review of Books ““Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” —Ross Macdonald ““Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude.” —Erle Stanley Gardner

Author Biography

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.