"He Created the Hard-Drinking, Self-Deprecating Antihero in His Own Image"

"Where did Chandler come by the wry worldview that would become synonymous with Los Angeles noir? Mr. Day lets his subject answer that question in his own words by stringing together hundreds of excerpts from the author's correspondence, fiction and screenplays. He stretches Chandler's limber language like a skein across the skeleton of his life, knitting in the spaces in between with his own editorial commentary. The book follows a loose chronology, with the quotations Mr. Day has connected reading at times like an expanded Chandler section in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations."


Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times reviews Barry Day's The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words.