Boy, he is the master! Of detective fiction, the thriller, the short story, the US filmy black and white cop drama - boy, he's got it all. I've watched his stories turned into film. But boy read his stuff - its great.Whose looking at you? see? Toast

I don’t normally read detective novels, but I had heard that Raymond Chandler was a great writer. I read Farewell My Lovely and thought it was hard to put down. It’s classic noir and the sparse language is great. I’ll probably read The Big Sleep.

A classic American hard-boiled crime novel. Could not put the book down, managed to read it in a day I was so hooked!

I really enjoyed this omnibus except for an important caveat. The 3 stories included are "The Big Sleep", "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The Long Good-Bye". Each story gives a great feeling of what 1940s-1950s America might have been like - but stylised, of course. Philip Marlowe is a great Private Detective who I came to like more and more as I read the stories - he has a strong moral compass that he follows despite the pressures being applied, which sometimes results in him being assaulted or jail...

The Big Sleep review

Let me paint you a picture to best describe this book (no spoilers): - Imagine walking into a dimly lit jazz bar with the sweet chimes of saxophones welcoming you. Wise-guys are dressed in trench coats and fedoras sipping on their whiskies and flirting with the ladies that tickle their fancy. A waft of cigarette smoke permeates the room, you knock into some guy and exchange ugly words. All of a sudden, menacing glares follow you and every man catches your suspicion. The women are stunning but do...

I've been a fan of Philip Marlow for years, but this has been more down to films and the ever-expanding world of the gumshoe parody character that seems to have pervaded every area of TV, film and The Simpsons.And yet i have never actually read any of Chandler's books.Weirdly I was led here by The Black-Eyed Blonde, written by Benjamin Black at the behest of the Chandler estate, after listening to Black talk about Chandler's life and work on a Guardian Books podcast.While looking forward to The

This was a big, heavy book. Since it was a hardback, and contained three complete novels, that was to be expected. It was also a big, heavy book in the reading matter. Phillip Marlowe was a man of his time. I loved his wit, self-deprecation, and descriptions of characters and surroundings. What the book suffered from was the way of life during the time these stories were written. All the cops were either complete caricatures or there was so much corruption, brutality and every other vice in all

Quite memorable. Highly recommended.

Raymond Chandler's novels that comprised as part of this collection always felt too short for me to justify picking them up as paperback copies individually, but when I saw that The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Good-Bye were all published together as an Omnibus edition I knew I had to pick it up and I was blown away by Chandler's excellent writing as he brings the truly memorable PI Phillip Marlowe and his adventures to life in a classic example of the noir genre at its best. Like

So maybe hardboiled detective stories from the 30s don't age so well (the PC police would have a good time shining a bright light on these stories in the homicide detective's messy office) - but it's still darn good writing. Off to find me some Dashiell Hammett.

You know that the world around you is not perfect. You know that you are not perfect. And you are a grown-up and know that your heroes are not perfect either, and neither should your fictional heroes be. And yet, you know that your heroes should stand for something, and that something should be bigger that themselves. Or merely the matter in hand.Philip Marlowe does not stand the test of time the way his creator, Raymond Chandler’s writing does. Chandler is a magician of the metaphor, the poet l...

My full review of The Big Sleep is available on Keeping Up With The Penguins.Everyone comes to The Big Sleep for Chandler’s descriptions of Los Angeles, and he was certainly an evocative place writer, but I personally loved his characterisations most of all. I got a lot of smirks out of descriptions like: “He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money” = brilliant! That said, Chandler was far from perfect when it came to plotting. The Big Sleep is complex, criss-crossing...

Varied in quality, with a steady improvement from earliest to latest of the three novels presented in this volume. Reading several Chandler novels in a shortish space of time reveals the technique he uses to disguise what is going on in his plots, weakening the reader's experience.Marlowe is revealed as a more interesting character as Chandler's skill as a writer improves, but the inevitable comparison between Chandler and Hammett favours the latter simply because Hammett created a wider range o...

A collage of sentences I have written about this book:I read the first two novels in this collection years ago and finally got around to reading the third one, The Long Goodbye. It is the longest, and perhaps the best of the bunch.Despite its chauvinism, I’ve always enjoyed detective Philip Marlowe’s stark commentary and devil-may-care attitude toward his life and work, and the way he distributes his grace is interesting.A “hard-boiled detective” I think Marlowe’s type is called. What does this

A collection of three classic novels by Raymond Chandler, pioneer undisputed master of his own LA-noir niche. Chandler's writing style, his cast of characters and the way he depicts post-war Los Angeles are so iconic that it feels familiar, even cliche, when you read him for the first time. Chances are, before you ever read the original, you've been exposed to derivatives, parodies or homages throughout film, TV and other literature. There's still a lot of fun to be had going to the source. The

It's certainly well worth the read and probably set the trend for a long time when it came to creating private investigator characters. Chandlers books are set in a world where both cops and PIs are har drinking tough guys who are not above using muscle to get a confession. This makes the stories seem dated. However, the stories are good and well constructed and once you immerse yourself in the world of 1940s/50s Los Angeles; they become very enjoyable.

"Ever hear of anybody named Paul Marston?'His head came up slowly. His eyes focused, but with effort. I could see him fighting for control. He won the fight - for the moment. His face became expressionless."Never did," he said carefully, speaking very slowly. "Who's he?" Collection containing The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye.The joy of this collection is seeing the change in Chandler's style, from needing to have the door thrown open by someone with a gun in their hand t

One of the great prose stylists in English, or one of the most distinct, and still, after all the imitators, the first and the best laconic private detective. The three novels here move from 'The Big Sleep" with its twisted sisters, via "Farewell my Lovely" with that famous line; " A blonde to make a Bishop kick a hole in a stained- glass window" and the unforgettable Moose Malloy: "He was a big man, but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck" who almost steals t...

With Chandler, at this stage, it seems impossible (for me) not to evaluate his novels by referencing the films that were made from them. The collection includes The Big Sleep (published in 1939 and filmed under that title by Howard Hawks in 1945/46), Farewell, My Lovely (published in 1940 and filmed as Murder, My Sweet by Edward Dmytryk in 1944), and The Long Goodbye (published in 1953 and shot by Robert Altman in 1973). First things first: the novels are far more complex than the films, includi...