Everybody Loves Raymond

A lot of people I know reread Raymond Chandler novels like The Big Sleep every couple of years. Especially writers. Some revisit The Long Goodbye over and over again, the way people keep returning to places like the Grand Canyon to be impressed, amazed, and inspired. And there are those who regard Farewell, My Lovely with the same reverence in which others hold the first Led Zeppelin LP. I don't have a personal favorite, but The Big Sleep is hard to beat, of course.

In seven classic novels and a handful of short stories, all with their genesis in the pages of the pulp magazine Black Mask (which served as a two-way mirror of society in much the way that pop-culture television works today), Raymond Chandler creates a peculiar and eternal kind of magic by using American hard-boiled vernacular of the pre- and early postwar era to conjure vivid portraits of that strange Eden by the Pacific called L.A. -- portraits that rank among the most enduring and most imitated work in the history of American literature. The novels spawned classic films that, along with the work of other noir writers, served as the spectral backbone of film noir, and still serve as seminal inspiration for filmmakers and authors today. Chandler's magic was so enduring that, even now, there's almost no way to describe the peculiarities of life in Los Angeles without inadvertently citing the author's prose.

Since June, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard has been reissuing Chandler's seven novels and two short story anthologies in the imprint's distinctive large-size, high-quality paperback, as classy and colorful as the man himself ($11-$13). Go ahead, pick one up, taste the words in your mouth and see why so many filmmakers, writers, and other humans have reveled in the scene-chewing thrill of lines like "I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun."