Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

<p>During a period of twenty years--from his start as a young writer for H. L. Mencken's classic pulp magazine <em>The Black Mask</em> in the early 1930s through the publication of his novels <em>The Big Sleep</em> and <em>Farewell My Lovely</em> to his career as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s--Raymond Chandler kept a series of private notebooks.</p><p>Drawn from those journals <em>The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler</em> offers an intimate view of the writer at work revealing early ideas descriptions and anecdotes that would later be used in <em>The Long Goodbye The Blue Dahlia</em> and other classics.</p><p>Filled with both public and private writings <em>The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler</em> includes Marlowesque particulars such as pickpocket lingo San Quentin jailhouse slang a Note on the Tommygun and musings on Craps. Here too are surprising lesser known essays on Hollywood the mystery story British and American writing and a wicked parody of Hemingway. This sampler--by turns whimsical provocative irreverent and fascinating--also contains a list of possible story titles; Chandlerisms; and his short work English Summer: A Gothic Romance which the writer viewed as a turning point in his career.</p>