The Big Sleep and Other Novels

One of the BBC''s ''100 Novels That Shaped Our World''

''Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since'' Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy

Raymond Chandler was America''s preeminent writer of detective fiction, and this edition of The Big Sleep and Other Novels collects three of the best novels to feature his hard-drinking, philosophising PI, Philip Marlowe.

Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Often imitated but never bettered, it is in Marlowe''s long shadow that every fictional detective must stand - and under the influence of Raymond Chandler''s addictive prose that every crime author must write. Marlowe''s entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures - is the background to a story reflecting