Raymond Chandler never wrote a memoir or autobiography. The closest he came to writing either was in and around his novels, shorts stories, and letters. There have been books that describe and evaluate Chandler s life, but to find out what he himself felt about his life and work, Barry Day, editor of "The" "Letters of Noel Coward "( There is much to dazzle here in just the way we expect . . . the book is meticulous, artfully structured splendid Daniel Mendelsohn; "The New York Review of Books"), has cannily, deftly chosen from Chandler s writing, as well as the many interviews he gave over the years as he achieved cult status, to weave together an illuminating narrative that reveals the man, the work, the worlds he created. Using Chandler s own words as well as Day s text, here is the life of the man with no home, a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, and the changing vernacular of the cultural psyche that resulted. Chandler makes clear what it is to be a writer, and in particular what it is to be a writer of hardboiled fiction in what was for him another language. Along the way, he discusses the work of his contemporaries: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham, and others ( I wish, said Chandler, I had one of those facile plotting brains, like Erle Gardner ). Here is Chandler s Los Angeles (