Philip Marlowe is the quintessential American detective. His effortless masculinity, smouldering sexuality and silver tongue remain the embodiment of cool. He likes booze, women, and working alone - portrayed on film by the rougher, tougher stars of Hollywood, Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart - but, in a world defined by betrayal, mistrust, and double-dealing, Marlowe's rough exterior belies an unshakeable code of honour. Taken together, his observations and witticisms represent some of the most scathing and brilliant writing in crime fiction, and coalesce into a wonderfully alluring worldview, a vision of unswerving righteousness, accountability, and stylish conduct in a sea of turpitude and injustice.
The first fully annotated edition of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 classic The Big Sleep features hundreds of illuminating notes and images alongside the full text of the novel and is an essential addition to any crime fiction fan’s library. A masterpiece of noir, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep helped to define a genre. Today it remains one of the most celebrated and stylish novels of the twentieth century. This comprehensive, annotated edition offers a fascinating look behind the scenes of the novel, bringing the gritty and seductive world of Chandler's iconic private eye Philip Marlowe to life. The Annotated Big Sleep solidifies the novel’s position as one of the great works of American fiction and will surprise and enthrall Chandler’s biggest fans. Including: -Personal letters and source texts -The historical context of Chandler’s Los Angeles, including maps and images -Film stills and art from the early pulps -An analysis of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in the novel
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.
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 Metaphysics of Detective Marlowe: Style, Vision, Hard-Boiled Repartee, Thugs, and Death-Dealing Damsels in Raymond Chandler’s Novels is a comparative study of ‘the life and times” of an American idol, Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe. It is a bitter-sweet critical exploration, meant to redefine the exceptional cultural profile, as well as the moral and social obsessions of one of America’s eminent fictional heroes. The study paints a colorful picture of the irresistible blend of romantic blind faith and social, moral and political toughness which characterized the United States in the 1930s-40s, with the memorable throng of drug dealers, hit men, vamps, corrupt politicians, and eccentric millionaires that colonize Raymond Chandler’s work. As the only defender of truth and honor in the Californian “Waste Land,” Philip Marlowe emerges as a symbolic figure, celebrated for the unique place he holds in the American hard-boiled mythology. The volume comprises an Introduction, Marlowe Before Marlowe, and four large chapters, each focusing on the innovations and enduring strategies behind Chandler’s persuasive vision: The Doughy Mass of Depravity, A Phantasm Called Style, The Villainy Septet and Marlowe After Marlowe. As presented in this book, Philip Marlowe is a sentimentalist of the worst type: one embarrassed to show his true feelings. He is tough, but not tough enough and, consequently, a charming loser, always defeated in his confrontations with psychopath monsters and the legions of death-dealing damsels. The Californian detective’s gentleness and callousness are endearing: the gentleness is always callous, and the callousness is barely gentle. He seems to be the survivor of an extinct species, living for and by a code of honor. He believes in the purity of desires, expressed in a nascent idiom, a kind of secret/public language that heralds the resurrection of the new hard-boiled diction. His genuine candor is perfectly expressed in the directness of his talk, a brilliant example of rhetorical tightrope walking. Philip Marlowe embodies the contradictions of the problematic modernism—half bedlam, half expressionism—of his time and ours alike. The tradition he inaugurated is consistently illustrated today by James Ellroy, Allan Guthrie, Walter Mosley, Megan Abbott or Charlie Hudson.
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.
Los Angeles, 1929: a glittering metropolis on the crest of an epic crash. A mysterious prophetess and her alluring daughter have relieved an oil tycoon's nephew of his fortune. But the kid won't talk. To find the money, the old man calls on a trusted executive, Raymond Chandler, who in turn enlists the aid of his devoted secretary/mistress, Muriel Fischer, and their idealistic patrolman friend Tom James. Soon the nephew is revealed as a high-ranking member of a murderous cult of angel worshippers, and the trio plunges into an investigation that sends them careening across Southern California, from sinister sanitariums to roadside burger stands, decaying Bunker Hill mansions to sparkling cocktail parties, taxi dance halls to the morgue, all in search of the secretive Great Eleven. But when Muriel goes undercover to infiltrate the group's rural lair, she comes face to face with disturbing truths that threaten to spoil everything, not just for the cult's members, but for herself as well. A work of fiction inspired by actual events and featuring the real-life cop who is a likely model for the mature Chandler's greatest creation, private eye Philip Marlowe, Kim Cooper's The Kept Girl exposes a mystery so horrifying, it could only be true.
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.
The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe • Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson. Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Trouble is My Business" 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.
