In such classics of noir as The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler wrote of his sleuth Philip Marlowe's pursuit of desperate criminals in mid-20th-century California. Although Chandler never wrote an autobiography, Barry Day collates hundreds of quotations here from Chandler's novels, stories, and letters to create a composite portrait of this former oil company executive who became a leading author of the hardboiled detective fiction genre and a successful screenwriter. Here too are more than 200 evocative black and white photographs, including rare early pictures of Chandler, images from his books and films, and depictions of the bygone Los Angeles that served as a setting for many of the novels.