Raymond Chandler’s classic gumshoe Philip Marlowe is the quintessential American detective. His effortless masculinity, smoldering sexuality, and verbal fleetness remain the embodiment of cool. He liked liquor, women, and working alone. And, in a world defined by betrayal, mistrust, and double-dealing, Marlowe’s rough exterior belies an unshakable code of honor. 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. Philip Marlowe’s Guide to Life is an elegant, A–Z compendium of Marlowe’s ever-more-relevant observations about crime, women, work, sex, good, evil, and life in the big city. Chandler’s genius transcended genre; though he seemed to single-handedly invent noir, his work ventured beyond it into an idiom all its own, and he left behind a legacy of grit and disarming beauty. Here is a brilliant and loving tribute to that legacy, sure to delight fans old and new.
Author
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been realized into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. Chandler's Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, are considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery".
