The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

During a period of twenty years—from his start as a young writer for H. L. Mencken’s classic pulp magazine The Black Mask in the early 1930s, through the publication of his novels The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, to his career as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s—Raymond Chandler kept a series of private notebooks.

Drawn from those journals, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler offers an intimate view of the writer at work, revealing early ideas, descriptions, and anecdotes that would...