SOURCE: "The Raw Material: The Short Stories," in Raymond Chandler, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981, pp. 85-104.

In the following essay, Speir discusses how Chandler's short stories evolved into novels and argues that the pulp stories were an essential stage in Chandler's development as a novelist.

Chandler's novels, of course, followed his noteworthy career as a writer of short stories for popular "pulp" magazines. A survey of those stories gives evidence of considerable experimentation in subject matter, style, point of view, and detective types which contributed to the novels' later success. Some of the stories were "cannibalized," as Chandler put it, into the novels, and a close look at that process allows us the unusual opportunity of observing the writer at work, transforming his own earlier, simpler material into the broader vision of the later books. But even the stories that weren't cannibalized have much to teach us about...