Noir Poet: The Art of Raymond Chandler

"He wrote like a slumming angel." - Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, took murder out of the drawing room and put it into the streets, where the people who killed had real reasons for doing so. In so doing, they ushered in the hard boiled detective and modern crime fiction. Chandler created a Los Angeles that never was but should have been, as well as one of the great literary characters of all time - Philip Marlowe. Everyone who came after, from Ross Macdonald to Sue Grafton to James Ellroy, walk in Chandler's shadow. He was that good; only Hammett could touch him.