Raymond Chandler wrote like the quintessential man’s man. His novels, such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, gave us hardboiled gumshoe Philip Marlowe chasing bad guys and consorting with dangerous dames, and doing it all in some of the most colorful, first-person-narrative verbal fillips ever created. With that in mind, editor Martin Asher has pulled together Philip Marlowe’s Guide to Life: A Compendium of Quotations by Raymond Chandler. Asher draws from the Chandler oeuvre and serves up keenly evocative quotable quotes, arranged topically from A-to-Z (in this case, from Advertising to Writers). Laced with singular wit and a deliciously cynical world view, these carefully chosen snippets of the Chandler genius are also often mercifully brief. For example, on marriage: For two people in a hundred it’s wonderful. Or, on coffee: I drank two cups black. Then I tried a cigarette. It was all right. I still belonged to the human race. A terrific gift idea for that literary, or maybe just very jaded, male.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
