"Raymond Chandler is a master." -
New York Times "Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence." -Ross Macdonald
"Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since." -Paul Auster
"The prose rises to heights of unself-conscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action-tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision...The reader is captivated by Chandler's seductive prose." -Joyce Carol Oates,
New York Review of Books "Chandler is one of my favorite writers. His books bear rereading every few years. The novels are a perfect snapshot of an American past, and yet the ruined romanticism of the voice is as fresh as if they were written yesterday." -Jonathan Lethem
"Chandler seems to have invented our post-war dream lives-the tough but tender hero, the dangerous blonde, the rain-washed sidewalks, and the roar of the traffic (and the ocean) in the distance...Chandler is the classic lonely romantic outsider for our times, and American literature, as well as English, would be the poorer for his absence." -Pico Iyer
With a new Introduction by Diane Johnson
