"The Pencil" by Raymond Chandler

Available in: Raymond Chandler: Collected Stories. Knopf, 2002.

To mark the 120th anniversary of Chandler's birth, a review of this 1959 story, written especially for England twenty years after Philip Marlowe's previous appearance in the short form.

Here Marlowe is hired by Ikky Rothstein, a low-level mobster who's been targeted by the Outfit for execution and is looking to excape. Enlisting the help of his lady friend Anne Riordan, Marlowe manages to keep two hitmen off Ikky's trail, but in the aftermath he finds another man identified as Rothstein and himself the target of a hit.

"Trouble is My Business" by Raymond Chandler

Available in: Raymond Chandler: Collected Stories. Knopf, 2002.

Slated to be adapted by Frank Miller for a Philip Marlowe movie starring Clive Owen, the novella "Trouble is My Business" has Marlowe working for a fledgling detective agency, digging up dirt on a woman who's got her claws into a rich man's son. He begins by calling another P.I. who's worked the case, but when Marlowe goes to meet him, he finds the P.I. dead.

"Trouble is My Business" is full of men entering with guns and eerily discovered deaths. Marlowe gets to the truth by sheer persistence. For me, this story was a reminder of how refined Chandler's prose was, how truly inimitable Marlowe was. The Everyman's Library edition is certainly worth the price.