Retro hardcover pulp Raymond Chandler novels
I just found these gorgeous retro Raymond Chandler editions from Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin UK. They're little, pulp-sized hardcovers with brilliant, pulpy covers and jacket-copy and spines, and they make a great set spine-out or face-up.
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While The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely are just generic covers, it's worth noting that the cover designs for the others are actually the artwork from the original first-edition dustjackets of the various books.
You put your glasses on now, Cory?
There's a great piece at the Penguin Blog describing how they brought these covers back to life.
For a second I thought these were ads for Bioshock 2.
The covers are great, but what's inside is better still. Chandler was the real deal -- perfect prose in an imperfect world.
did Chandler write a book about how to write detective stories? or am I confusing him with someone else?
#4, curtismayfield: He wrote a fairly well-known essay about what was wrong with the traditional detective story and ways to fix it called "The Simple Art of Murder". That may be what you're thinking of.
The essay is fairly easy to find online. (Such as here — though that one is incorrect in one regards in that the actual original date of publication is 1944. 1950 merely is the year it first appeared in a book.)
I was a big reader of the pulps in my early teens, including some of the crime and detective things, but given more to adventure and early sci-fi. I bought most of them at a local drugstore that also had, I ask you to believe, a lending library, where books rented for a few cents a day. Somehow I checked out a hardcover collection of Raymond Chandler stories entitled Spanish Blood. I was absolutely hooked from the first page.
I didn't know exactly how his stuff was different, or even why, but I knew it was a cut above all the phony Murder In The Flower Garden stuff by Agatha Christie, et al. It was obvious that it didn't matter who-dun-it or even how. The stories were about people, amazing people, real people, unpredictable and menacing people. My taste for good writing, as compared to mere writing, was born.
''She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much for kittens.''