Prefaced by the famous Atlantic Monthly essay of the same name, in which he argues the virtues of the hard-boiled detective novel, this collection mostly drawn from stories he wrote for the pulps demonstrates Chandler's imaginative, entertaining...
A man facing penury will do almost anything when a rich and attractive woman offers him fifty thousand dollars, just to make a telephone call. But when the telephone call is part of a fake kidnap plan to extract five hundred thousand dollars from...