1.Not long before his death, he wrote, "I have lived my life on the edge of nothing."

2. Those who may speak honestly of the ambiguous but striking privileges granted by a life conducted on the edge of nothing tend to have in common that they have been faced early on with certain kinds of decisively formative experiences. Although it is never mentioned in considerations of his work, when he was six years old and living with his divorced mother in Nebraska, his alcoholic father, already more an absence than a presence, one day disappeared entirely. Also never mentioned is that in 1918 he was sent into trench warfare as a twenty-year-old sergeant in the Canadian Army and several times led his platoon into direct machine-gun fire. After that, he said later, "nothing is ever the same again."

3. He had no interest in either conventional mysteries or the people who read them.

4. He said: "My theory was that readers just thought that they cared about nothing but the action; that really although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The thing they really cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description."

5. His models were Dumas, Dickens, Flaubert, James and Conrad.

6. He once named a cop Hemingway for his habit of saying the same thing over and over again until you started to think that it had to be pretty good.

7. He could never understand why Americans were incapable of seeing the humor in his work.

8. Shortly after moving to a house outside Palm Springs, he wrote his publisher, Alfred Knopf, "This place bores me."

9. Raymond Chandler did not relish surprises.

10. He did not like looking at the ocean because it had too much water and too many drowned men in it.

11. In a sour moment, he wrote Knopf that he was going to write "one of those books where everyone goes for nice long walks."

12. Late at night, finished with work but unwilling to leave the typewriter, he wrote hundreds of extremely long letters, many of them to people he had never met.

13. Hollywood made him bilious, but he loved film.

14. In his notes for The Blue Dahlia, he said homicide detectives could "be very pleasant or very unpleasant almost without change of expression."

15. He was exasperated by people who told him they so admired his books that they wished he would write one without any murders in it.

16.