I am a long-time fan of Everyman's Library editions. Modern Library is beautiful and Penguin Classics aren't too shabby either, but there's nothing quite like an Everyman's Library. I love the old editions (the little pocket size hardcovers in the colourful jackets) and I love the new editions. I fell in love with the look and feel of this Raymond Chandler collection the moment I picked it up.
This was my first time reading Chandler. I ordered this book off amazon on a whim (one of my late night accidental book buying episodes) because I remember watching the Humphrey Bogart adaptation of The Big Sleep when I was a teenager.
All three titles in this collection are detective novels, written in the 1930s and 1940s, about private investigator Philip Mallow. For the first time in my life (outside of the movies and TV) I heard the classic detective narration, and I swear, every other page in these novels, Mallow was lighting cigarettes and pouring drinks.
In The Big Sleep Mallow is hired by a client who is being blackmailed. In Farewell, My Lovely, Mallow is drawn into a murder when he meets a man just out of prison looking for a girl named Velma. In The High Window Mallow is hired to retrieve a stolen rare coin and find a rich window's missing daughter-in-law.
The world of Philip Mallow was a wonderful and exciting place to pass away a few hours in. These are light, short novels stretching about 200-250 pages each. I read through each of them in a couple of hours. I should note, for sensitive readers, that Chandler's writing--while good--is plagued with sexism and racism. I could excuse him, by saying he was of his time, but I won't.
It is what it is, however. Chandler should be read with the same frame of mind as one might read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a 1960s Harlequin, or Huckleberry Finn. A critical eye is important.
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