THE FOLIO SOCIETY

'Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Her eyes were shiny black shoe buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same color. She was sitting behind a desk that looked like Napoleon's tomb and was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. She said: "I need a man".'

The mood is dark, the atmosphere electric, the voice unmistakable - in his stiletto-sharp thrillers, Raymond Chandler changed the face of crime fiction forever. As the creator of Philip Marlowe, the most famous fictional detective since Sherlock Holmes, Chandler became the undisputed master of the hard-boiled school. For Chandler the solution of the mystery was only the 'olive on the martini' and what distinguished his writing was a dazzling ability to capture immediately a character, a situation or a mood.

Turning to writing in midlife, Chandler honed his skill in stories produced for the pulp magazines Black Mask and Dime Detective, which are set against the tarnished glamour of 1930s Los Angeles. In this city of contrasts, from seedy bars to opulent Beverly Hills mansions, Chandler's cool, tough-talking private eyes stalk a landscape peopled with good and bad cops, predatory blondes and deadly redheads, rich mobsters and paranoid millionaires, and seeped in blackmail, racketeering, corruption, sex and alcohol. 'Trouble,' as the sardonic, wise-cracking Marlowe observes, 'is my business ... How else would I make a nickel?'

Here are twelve of Chandler's greatest stories, all written in the first person and not only memorable in themselves but also resonating with characters and scenes which he would later use in his classic novels The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. Chandler's vividly imagined underworld and edgy, poetic style inspired 'film noir' and crime writing for half a century.

• Finger Man
• Killer in the Rain
• The Man Who Liked Dogs
• Goldfish
• The Curtain
• Try The Girl
• Mandarin's Jade
• Red Wind
• Bay City Blues
• The Lady in the Lake
• Trouble is my Business
• The Pencil