These stories are where Chandler honed his art and developed his uniquely vivid underworld, peopled with good cops and bad cops, informers and extortionists, lethally predatory blondes and redheads, and crime, sex, gambling, and alcohol in abundance. In addition to his classic hard-boiled stories–in which his signature atmosphere of depravity and violence swirls around the cool, intuitive loners whose type culminated in the famous detective Philip Marlowe–Chandler also turned his hand to fantasy and even a gothic romance.This rich treasury of twenty-five stories shows Chandler developing the terse, laconic, understated style that would serve him so well in his later masterpieces, and immerses the reader in the richly realized fictional universe that has become an enduring part of our literary landscape.

    Exhausted, lost, and at the end of her rope, she was eager for a hot shower and a bed for the night. Her room was musty but clean and the plumbing worked. Norman Bates, the manager, seemed nice, if a little odd.

    Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

    - The Rat-A-Tat Mystery - The Ragamuffin Mystery

    This collection contains all 25 of his short stories, including classics such as The Curtain and The King in Yellow, as well as all seven of his novels, including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.  Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

    

    August arrives and the village carnival is going ahead. In the heightened carnival atmosphere, more sinister undertones are revealed when the corpse of the hated mine manager is discovered. The secrets and tensions of a close-knit community are exposed, and loyalties are pushed to their extremes. When it was originally released, it was well-received as an outstanding detective story and a poet's novel.

    These are his years when, from 17 on, he was involved in crimes of many sorts, lived with (and off) many women, had a son, and ends his story on his way to the nick (jail). He has tales of art forgers, of getting slashed, of taking the charge (dope), of growing marijuana, of geezers and queers and their "wedding", of the many times he hits rock bottom, and of the strange world that inhabits his favorite kayf (cafe) 86. A rake's progress of modern times, this has more than a little of the Runyon atmosphere and style, and if its vocabulary does not cheese off readers they will find it a bit of a really low down lark.