In the past decade, Raymond Chandler has come to be recognized as a major mid-century American novelist. Though an immensely popular writer of mysteries, Chandler is now receiving the serious attention of scholars. He is seen as a writer with a deliberate approach toward the creation of fictions that present a significant criticism of American life. The essays and reviews in this volume trace the response to Chandler's work from 1944 to the present.

This volume traces the changing reception of Chandler's works. It includes essays and reviews from 1944 to the present. These pieces treat various aspects of Chandler's art, such as his writing style, the nature of the hard-boiled detective hero, the relation of Chandler to his contemporaries, Los Angeles as the setting for his fiction, studies of individual novels, and analyses of films of Chandler's works. An introductory chapter provides a context for understanding Chandler as a writer, and the bibliography at the end of the volume demonstrates the growing amount of attention his novels are receiving.