Trouble is my business (Penguin Books)

Trouble is My Business is a collection of four riveting novellas from Raymond Chandler. In the first of the four cases in Trouble is My Business, LA PI Philip Marlowe is offered a job that leaves a bad taste in the mouth: smearing a girl who's 'got her hooks into a rich man's pup'.

Before too long Marlowe's up to his neck in corpses and cops and he's taken pity on the girl. There's nothing like making trouble of your business...The four novellas collected here are quintessential Raymond Chandler: slick, crystal-clear writing that pins the reader to the seat and won't let go until the last page is turned.

Praise for Raymond Chandler: "Chandler's prose flies off the pages like a burst from a Tommy gun. Chandler was perhaps the finest exponent of the fledgling genre now known as pulp fiction".

(Scottish Field). "One of the greatest crime writers, who set the standards others still try to attain". (Sunday Times). "Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner...An original...A great artist".

(Boston Review). "Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since". (Paul Auster).Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to England with his family when he was twelve.

He attended Dulwich College, Alma Mater to some of the twentieth century's most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married.

It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later by his first novel.

The Big Sleep introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the often imitated but never-bettered hard-boiled private investigator. It is in Marlowe's long shadow that every fictional detective must stand - and under the influence of Raymond Chandler's addictive prose that every crime author must write.