Oddly, this collection apparently obfuscates the evolution of Chandler's protagonist from a hard-nosed hireling (like Hammett's Continental Op) to a cynical humanitarian, Philip Marlowe. With Chandler's consent -- or at his insistence, for all I know -- all the narrators are given the name of Marlowe. But, according to Rara-Avis, in two of the stories the detectives originally had other names and in one he remained anonymous. Many Chandler collections have been published over the years. I'm not sure which ones have been "Marlowed."
Trouble Is My Business by Raymond Chandler. Pocket Books (1951), approx. 240 pp.
This collection includes four stories originally published in pulp crime magazines during the 1930s. In "Trouble Is My Business" (1939) Philip Marlowe is hired to break up an affair between a rich man's son and a classy red-head. Marlowe gets involved with some shady politicos in "Finger Man" (1934) and pursues stolen pearls in "Goldfish" (1936). In "Red Wind" (1938) Marlowe witnesses an expertly executed barroom murder, then runs into a beautiful woman mentioned by the victim. The stories range in length from 52 to 67 pages. All but the third are primarily set in Los Angeles. Prefacing the collection is a short introduction written by Chandler in 1950.
This book samples the two dozen crime stories that Chandler wrote before publishing his first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939. Each of the four stories has the sardonic first-person narrator familiar to fans of Chandler's longer work. The length of the stories cuts two ways. At roughly 60 pages they provide satisfying one- or two-hour gulps of murder and mayhem. But neither the plots, the characters, nor the descriptions of setting are as complex as those in Chandler's novels. In his introduction the author says of pulp fiction generally that "far too many people got killed in these stories and their passing was celebrated in a rather too loving attention to detail." That observation goes quadruple for this book.