Following a four-page Raymond Chandler chronology, a dictionary-style guide to his life and work includes exhaustive plot summaries (e.g., six-and-a-half double-columned pages on The Big Sleep), identifications of major and minor characters, family and professional associations (e.g., Cissy Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Alfred A. Knopf, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph T. Shaw, Robert B. Parker), and such topics as Alcoholism, Cannibalized Stories, PhD Dissertations, and Women Mystery Writers. This very useful source is spiced by the sort of quirky opinions common to single- author reference books. (Is it really fair to say that John F. Kennedy was "hardly ethical in recommending [Ian Fleming's] From Russia With Love"?) One monumental factual howler, the claim that Hammett "wrote the movie script of City Lights, a Charlie Chaplin masterpiece (1931)," should not detract from an otherwise estimable reference.