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.

    The job that will set them up for life. A million dollars split five ways, who wouldn't be interested? The only catch is that it's the very definition of impossible...or is it? Armed with a brilliant plan, the four men and one woman think they can crack it. But as tensions in the group begin to mount and things start to go wrong, the million dollars feels more out of reach than ever. Even though it is right with them...

    Its strong colloquial vein was a revolution in language as well as subject matter.... Marlowe liberated his author's imagination into an overheard democratic prose which is one of the most effective narrative instruments in our recent literature... Chandler's novels focus his hero's sensibility, and could almost be described as novels of sensibility. Their constant theme is big city lonliness and the wry pain of a sensitive man coping with the roughest elements of a corrupt society. It is Marlowe's doubleness that makes him interesting: the hard-boiled mask half-concealing Chandler's poetic and satiric mind Ross MacDonald

    There was a strength about him that was undeniable, a readiness set to explode. Ric was a man well-chosen for the job of saving someone's life, even if it cost him his own. New Mexico was the Last Chance stop on the road - for Ric, for Handsome, for Martin, for Peggy, and for Eve, especially for Eve."