Killer in the Rain

'I pushed her back into the house without saying anything, shut the door. We stood looking at each other inside. She dropped her hand slowly and tried to smile. Then all expression went out of her white face and it looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box...I lit my cigarette, puffed it slowly for a moment and then asked: "What are you doing here?" Before creating Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler perfected the hardboiled private detective story in the pages of "Blask Mask" magazine - tough, spare tales of gumshoes and murder, laced with a weary lyricism and deadpan, laconic wit. "Killer in the Rain" is vintage Chandler, the groundwork for his classic first novel "The Big Sleep".

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to England with his family when he was twelve. He attended Dulwich College, Alma Mater to some of the twentieth century's most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later by his first novel. The Big Sleep introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the often imitated but never-bettered hard-boiled private investigator. 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. He died in California in 1959.