I don't know why the hell I write so many letters, Raymond Chandler once mused to a correspondent. "I guess my mind is just to active for its own good." In the

Selected letters and nonfiction of one of America’s most beloved writers “reveals the occasionally softer side of the man behind the hard-boiled mysteries�

Tough-minded and typically idiosyncratic, here is Chandler on Chandler, the mystery novel, writing, Hollywood, TV, publishing, cats, and famous crimes. This ski