Four stories ("Chinese Jade," "The Woman of the Lake," "There Is No Peace in the Mountains," and, indeed, "Bay City Blues") from the eight (the others are collected in "The Man Who Liked Dogs"), written between 1935 and 1941, of which Raymond Chandler was extremely jealous: he refused to publish them during his lifetime, and they were released posthumously in 1964. For the writer, they constituted a secret source to draw ideas for writing one of his novels. He extracted now a character, now an episode, now a description. There is even a precursor of the famous private investigator Philip Marlowe: a detective named Johnny Dalmas, but he is already the "man born for adventure," driven by the desire to complete a work that is "passionately moral."
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