Re-issued for the 50th anniversary of the film of Chandler's novel 'The Big Sleep', this homage to film noir is a visionary journey across a landscape of darkened bungalows, decaying office blocks and sinister nightspots - an atmospheric tribute to both the writer and his city. Contains over 150 photographs and extracts from Chandler's classic detective fiction.
Raymond Chandler was among the most original and enduring crime novelists of the twentieth century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he became the writer who would create in Philip Marlowe an icon of American culture. Visiting Chandler's many homes and apartments, Freeman uncovers vestiges of the Los Angeles that was Chandler's terrain and inspiration for his imagination. She also uncovers the life of Cissy Pascal, the older, twice-divorced woman Chandler married in 1924. A revelation of a marriage that was a wellspring of need, illusion, and creativity, The Long Embrace provides us with a more complete picture of Raymond Chandler's life and art than any we have had before.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
The life of Raymond Chandler has long been obscured by secrets and half-truths as deceptive as anything in his novel The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters, and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Tom Williams casts a new light on this most mysterious of writers. The Raymond Chandler revealed is a man troubled by loneliness and desertion from an early age. Born in Chicago in 1888, his childhood was overshadowed by the collapse of his parents' marriage, his father's alcohol-fuelled violence eventually forcing the boy and his doting mother to leave for Ireland and later London. But class-bound England proved stifling, and Chandler, in his twenties and eager to forge a new life, returned to the United States where—in corruption-ridden Los Angeles—he met his one great love, Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior. It was only during middle age, after his alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction. And his legacy—the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe—endures, compelling generations of crime writers to follow him. In this long-awaited new biography, Tom Williams shadows one of the true literary giants of the twentieth century and considers how crime writing was raised to the level of art.
Tasked with tracking down the estranged wife of a high-profile client, Derace Kingsley, hard-boiled private investigator Philip Marlowe is soon pulled in over his head when he discovers the drowned body of a woman at a lake. When a local cop takes interest in the investigation, Marlowe needs to solve the increasingly complex puzzle quickly . . . not just to save his client’s reputation, but his own neck as well. The Lady in the Lake is the fourth Philip Marlowe story by Raymond Chandler and one of the best-loved. Since it was first published in 1943, The Lady in the Lake has been adapted for film and radio. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
When Philip Marlowe befriends down-on-his-luck veteran Terry Lennox he gets more than he bargained for. With Lennox's wife dead and Lennox himself on the lam, Marlowe becomes the target for the local cops and a crazy gangster, while getting mixed up with alcoholic writer Roger Wade and his wife Eileen. Nothing is what it seems as Marlowe unravels the Wades' scheme to expose the truth behind Lennox's facade. The most autobiographical of his novels, The Long Goodbye was considered by Chandler to be his best work. One of the preeminent examples of hard-boiled detective fiction, The Long Goodbye has been adapted for radio, film and television, and received the 1955 Edgar Award for Best Novel. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
The World of Raymond Chandler shows how Chandler precariously balanced the values of a classical English education against those of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War; how he adopted Los Angeles as his home after WWI, with Hollywood in turn adopting him (and adapting his works); how his detective hero and alter ego Philip Marlowe evolved over the years; and, above all, what it is to be a writer, and in particular one writing in the “other language” of hardboiled fiction. Acclaimed biographer and historian Barry Day deftly interweaves images and text, using quotations from Chandler’s novels, short stories, letters, and interviews, to craft a unique portrait of the mystery writer’s life and times.
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, charmer, gentlman, drunk-was full of contradictions as his origins. His seven Philip Marlowe stories had sold 5 million copies by the time of his death in1059. Since the first authorised biography 20 years ago, much new material can be revealed about the man and his life. For this major new biography, Tom Hiney has had some access to unseen personal papers, as well as previously unrecorded reminiscences by those who knew him well and he vividly evokes the strange early years, brings alive the danerous glamour of the Hollywood era, and puts Chandler`s writing in the context of the crime and corruption in Prohibition LA. He gives illuminating details of friendships with Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, the Spenders, Alfred Hitchcock and fully records for the first time his relationship with Cissy, his wife of 30 years, 17 years his senior, and his paradoxical relations with other women.
