One hundred years after the birth of Raymond Chandler (1888) and three decades after he finished typing the last of his Philip Marlowe stories, twenty-three of the most famous mystery writers have penned new short stories featuring Philip Marlowe, aiming to honor the work of Raymond Chandler.

These contemporary writers, creators of today's most well-known cinematic and television heroes, share Chandler's respect for the literary value of the detective story. Many of them would not be writers today if Chandler had not followed Hammett from the narrow alleys of fiction into the realm of art.

They all write about Philip Marlowe, that idealistic, just, tough, smart, witty, and kind detective who, according to Chandler's words, is "the embodiment of an attitude, the exaggeration of a possibility."

The result of this collective effort, together with the unpublished in Greece story by Chandler "The Pencil," is presented in two volumes and shines a light in the best way on one of the longest-lived heroes of our century.

The twenty-three stories cover the entire life of Philip Marlowe from the mid-1930s -when his career begins with the story "The Simple Act of Murder," published in Black Mask- until 1959, when Raymond Chandler died in La Jolla, California, leaving the unfinished novel "The Poodle Springs Story."