"Actually, whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful... books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art."
—W H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

"Of today's serious writers, only Graham Greene has given us a comparable rendering of the habits and habitats of the individual at loose ends in a great city. With Chandler, mood becomes dominant, and response to it is everything in the appreciation of his work. Consciously or unconsciously, the classic private eye represents an attempt to transfer the man with a code from the lost Eden of the nineteenth-century American West to the modern jungle of the cities."
—Richard Schickel, Commentary