Book description
I pushed her back into the house without saying anything, shut the
door. We stood looking at each other inside. She dropped her hand slowly
and tried to smile. Then all expression went out of her white face and
it looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box I lit my cigarette,
puffed it slowly for a moment and then asked: What are you doing here?
Before creating Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler perfected the
hardboiled private detective story in the pages of Blask Mask magazine
tough, spare tales of gumshoes and murder, laced with a weary lyricism
and deadpan, laconic wit. Killer in the Rain is vintage Chandler, the
groundwork for his classic first novel The Big Sleep. Raymond Thornton
Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to England with his
family when he was twelve. 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 by his first
novel. The Big Sleep introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the often
imitated but never-bettered hard-boiled private investigator. It is in
Marlowe s long shadow that every fictional detective must stand and
under the influence of Raymond Chandler s addictive prose that every
crime author must write. He died in California in 1959.
