"Raymond Chandler is a master." --"The New York Times""[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered." --"The New Yorker "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious." --Robert B. Parker, "The New York Times Book Review "Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye." --"Los Angeles Times "Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist." --"The Boston Book Review "Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler's prose. . . . He wrote like an angel." --"Literary Review "[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious 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." --Joyce Carol Oates, "The New York Review of Books "Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence." --Ross Macdonald""Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude." --Erle Stanley Gardner""Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since." --Paul Auster "[Chandler]'s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that's like ours, but isn't." --Carolyn See"