The pieces in this collection show the creator of Phillip Marlowe to be a sensitive and thoughtful man, though someone who seemed to like nothing more than speaking his mind. Chandler kept up lively correspondences with friends and in his letters he comments with true candor on books, films, people, and the characters he created. In one priceless letter he berates a publisher over the cover of an edition of Farewell, My Lovely: "The bedspring shown in your cover illustration is entirely wrong, since it is a type of spring which is very light and would be useless as a weapon ..." And with that, he's only getting started. In excerpts from his notebooks he holds forth on writing, and one of the masters of the hardboiled mystery passes along much working knowledge of his craft. Chandler's essay "Writers In Hollywood," which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, holds up wonderfully (though if published today it would require the addition of some zeros to the figures Chandler cites). Raymond Chandler Speaking is a small treasure house of lively thoughts and crisp prose.