I believe the first edition of this book was published in the late sixties. Well before the 1982 publication of Frank MacShane's gigantic tome "The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler", and Robert B. Parker's "Poodle Springs" in which he would complete "The Poodle Springs Story" But now that those books exist (one of which has been reprinted in two seperate editions to tie in with HBO's 1998 telvision movie "Poodle Springs") they make "Raymond Chandler Speaking" obsolete and as such 99.99% useless. All of the essays that are reprinted are also reprinted in the stellar Library of America volume "Later Novels and Other Writings" All of the added together means that the sole reason to purchase "Raymond Chandler Speaking" is the short story "A Couple of Writers". Why no one else has reprinted it is beyond me. And another thing, how can a whole section be devoted to Raymond Chandler on famous crimes and not include Chandler's 1948 article for "Cosmopolitan" "The Ten Greatest Crimes of the Century"??? In which case "Raymond Chandler Speaking would only be 99.98% useless as this article has not been published in book form. I obtained my copy from the public library in the form of a grainy photocopy. As near as I can tell, this paperback copy was published in '97 which would have given them more than enough time from the publication of Macshane and Parker's books to revise this new edition to include more relevant items.

Originally published in 1962, this collage of excerpts from Chandler's letters, essays and drafts today is a rather unsatisfactory way to begin dabbling in Chandler's non-fiction. A much better book is the Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, and I understand a new book of the man's correspondance will be published in early 2001. The problem with Raymond Chandler Speaking is that everything is sliced, diced and presented in a very artificial order. You have a sections such as "Raymond Chandler on Cats," Raymond Chandler on Detective Novels," and "Raymond Chandler on Writers." Most of the material is excerpted from letters--letters which appear in full and in chronological order in the Selected Letters of RC. In this book, just as Chandler's rhythm starts to click in, just as the writing's beginning to get interesting, the snippet ends. Editor Dorothy Gardiner has made a good first attempt at giving readers a feel for the author, but its been done much better since then. Of course, you get some good oddball selections from RC, like a short story ("A Couple of Writers"), the "Writers in Hollywood" essay and RC's contribution to Poodle Springs, a 12-page start to a novel that Robert B. Parker would later finish and publish as a post-mortem collaboration. There's enough here to warrant a Chandler completist to include in his/her collection, but if you want to read something with a little more momentum and that gives you a better sense of RC as a person, read the Selected Letters first.

A "page turner" is a term I usually reserve for compelling and dramatic fiction, but in this case it is apt for "Raymond Chandler Speaking," the closest thing we have to a memoir or autobiography from the most influential mystery writer of the 20th century. Although not a particularly prolific novelist, Chandler was, nevertheless, an inveterate letter writer, and his words, penned in the haunting hours of the night and probably often in an alcoholic stupor, provide wonderful insight into this man who turned a low-brow fictional form into poetry. If you've enjoyed his novels, but not gotten around to this collection of letters and a few other writings (including the first four chapters of his last novel, "Poodle Springs"), then you're in for a treat: the colorful phrase, the scintillating simile, the terse but punchy sentence-all trademarks of his groundbreaking fiction-are found in abundance here, as Chandler waxes philosophically on Hollywood, agents, writers, publishers, and cats (the feline kind). You will find something in this small volume that you could not possibly anticipate on a topic you would think would be off turf: for me it was Chandler writing on the dysfunctional effects of television, as he saw it in 1950; with pen cynically dripping with sarcasm, he wrote: "Television is really what we have been looking for all our lives.... You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought.... You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it." Fifty years later, a good portion of the sum of academic and professional criticism of television are mere extensions of Chandler's intuitive judgment about the medium. Chandler's matchless mind and personality could have led him to many successful careers, if he controlled his personal demons; but he chose detective fiction over business, academics, politics or social/cultural criticism. This volume of letters and writings give us insight into his complex mind with its deep secrets and doubts. Little wonder this book, first published in 1962, remains (with updated introductory material) in print and a staple for libraries and the personal collections of people who like exploring the treads of genius that launched a new literary form.