Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959) Selected Bibliography

This post was intended as a private note, but I thought it might be of some interest to any regular or casual reader.

Novels

• The Big Sleep. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1939.
• Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1940.
• The High Window. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1943.
• The Lady in the Lake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944.
• The Little Sister. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.
• The Long Goodbye. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.
• Playback. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

Short Fiction

• ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’. Black Mask, December 1933
• ‘Smart-Aleck Kill’. Black Mask, July 1934.
• ‘Finger Man’. Black Mask, October 1934.
• ‘Killer in the Rain’. Black Mask, January 1935.
• ‘Nevada Gas’. Black Mask, June 1935.
• ‘Spanish Blood’. Black Mask, November 1935.
• ‘Guns at Cyrano’s’. Black Mask, January 1936.
• ‘The Man Who Liked Dogs’. Black Mask, March 1936.
• ‘Noon Street Nemesis’ (republished as ‘Pickup on Noon Street’). Detective Fiction Weekly, May 30, 1936.
• ‘Goldfish’. Black Mask, June 1936.
• ‘The Curtain’. Black Mask, September 1936.
• ‘Try the Girl’. Black Mask, January 1937.
• ‘Mandarin’s Jade’. Dime Detective Magazine, November 1937.
• ‘Red Wind’. Dime Detective Magazine, January 1938.
• ‘The King in Yellow’. Dime Detective Magazine, March 1938.
• ‘Bay City Blues’. Dime Detective Magazine, June 1938.
• ‘The Lady in the Lake’. Dime Detective Magazine, January 1939.
• ‘Pearls Are a Nuisance’. Dime Detective Magazine, April 1939.
• ‘Trouble Is My Business’. Dime Detective Magazine, August 1939.
• ‘I’ll Be Waiting’. Saturday Evening Post, October 14, 1939.
• ‘The Bronze Door’. Unknown Magazine, November 1939.
• ‘No Crime in the Mountains’. Detective Story, September 1941.
• ‘Professor Bingo’s Snuff’. Park East, June-August 1951; Go, June-July 1951.
• ‘Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate’. London Daily Mail, April 6-10 1959, also published as ‘The Wrong Pidgeon’. Manhunt, February 1961. Reprinted as ‘The Pencil’, Argosy, September 1965; and “Philip Marlowe’s Last Case”, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1962.
• ‘English Summer’. First published posthumously in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler and English Summer: A Gothic Romance by Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane, The Ecco Press, New York, 1976.

See also Raymond Chandler bibliography at Wikipedia here

Notes on Noir Fiction

Following my previous post here about the differences between hardboiled, noir fiction and crime fiction, I would like to share with you a couple of notes.

There is a lot of overlap between hardboiled and noir fiction, and the distinction is partly based on formal differences and partly on conditions of historical origin. On the question of historical origin, I understand hardboiled to originate in the twenties, while noir follows in the thirties. The first major work to break away from the tradition of the detective is W.R. Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929).

Noir fiction, in America, can be defined as a sub-genre of the Hardboiled School. In this sub-genre, the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator. He is someone tied directly to the crime, not an outsider called to solve or fix the situation. Other common characteristics of this sub-genre are the emphasis on sexual relationships and the use of sex to advance the plot and the self-destructive qualities of the lead characters. This type of fiction also has the lean, direct writing style and the gritty realism commonly associated with hardboiled fiction. (George Tuttle)

It is also of interest to note the following observation by George Tuttle: ‘…the French use of the term noir was not identical to the American use of the term. For the French, roman noir is the hardboiled novel. The Americans hijacked the word noir, scraped off the roman and tacked on fiction and adopted it as something distinct. Americans seem to use the term to identify a type of hardboiled fiction where themes of loneliness, despair, sexual obsession, and hard luck are prevalent.’

And furthermore: “Film noir” is not the cinematic counterpart of the “roman noir” or “noir fiction.” The concept of film noir developed independently and has only an indirect relationship.

Further reading:

A brief article here by Otto Penzler at The Huffington Post,

…NOIR FICTION by George Tuttle,

What Is Noir? by George Tuttle

The New Yorker

Some examples that may help define noir fiction as well as any definition:

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by James M. Cain

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) by Horace McCoy

The Bride Wore Black (1940) by Cornell Woolrich

Double Indemnity (1941) by James M. Cain

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945) by Cornell Woolrich as George Hopley

In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes

Waltz into Darkness (1947) by Cornell Woolrich (William Irish)

Strangers on a Train (1950) by Patricia Highsmith

The Killer Inside Me (1952) by Jim Thompson

Hell Hath No Fury (1953) by Charles Williams

Down There (1956) aka Shoot the Piano Player by David Goodis