Killer in the Rain

From the creased pages of 1930s pulp magazines Black Mask and Dime Detective come eight of Raymond Chandler's finest short stories:

KILLER IN THE RAIN, THE MAN WHO LIKED DOGS, THE CURTAIN, TRY THE GIRL, MANDARIN'S JADE, BAY CITY BLUES, THE LADY IN THE LAKE and NO CRIME IN THE MOUNTAINS

Set against a Southern Californian backdrop, the stories are rich with suspense, violence and tragedy, and each comes laced with booze, bullets and a detective with an eye for a damsel in distress and an even keener eye for justice . . .

Readers will also recognize episodes, characters and flashbacks from the Marlowe novels that made Chandler the undisputed master of his genre.

'Anything he writes about grips the mind from the first sentence. It is a spare, finished performance: full of life and character: as tense as a tiger, springing into action' Daily Telegraph

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times

'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess

Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude Erle Stanley Gardner

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but moved to England with his family when he was twelve, where he attended Dulwich College, alma mater to some of the twentieth century's most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler died in 1959, having established himself as the finest crime writer in America.