Raymond Chandler

Let's take it from the top. All right, Marlowe, you're on the air: "It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.

It was one of those dry autumn L.A. days, the kind that makes your eyes water and your skin itch. I was driving along North Rexford through Beverly Hills, admiring the fall foliage, what there is of it. I pulled into a parking structure next to the Beverly Hills Public Library, an ocher postmodern pastiche that featured as many quotations as the books inside. I was there to listen to a panel of distinguished writers discuss the great hard-boiled detective novelist and bard of L.A.

Dashiell Hammett in "The Maltese Falcon" gave the world Sam Spade and the private detective as a literary sub-genre. Then a curious and troubled figure named Raymond Chandler, in a short but blazing series of novels, extended the form and became the principal poet of all the knights in frayed trench coats walking alone down mean streets.

----- Playback A Graphic Novel Raymond Chandler Adapted by Ted Benoit Illustrated by Francois Ayroles Introduction by Philippe Garnier Arcade: 98 pp. $19.95 ----- A Scanner Darkly A Graphic Novel Philip K. Dick Additional Text by Harvey Pekar Book design by Laura Dumm and Gary Dumm Pantheon: 190 pp., $23.

"City of Angels," the hit New York musical playing at the Shubert, is haunted by the ghost of Raymond Chandler. It is two plays in one--one centered around a screenwriter who is writing a private-eye movie in the genre of Chandler's "The Big Sleep," the other is the movie itself. Before the curtain rises, several of the landmarks Chandler wrote about are outlined in lights around the proscenium--City Hall, Grauman's Chinese Theater, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

For an author, it's a dream come true. Imagine you're a British crime writer who has been awarded round-trip air fare plus $20,000 to spend up to nine months in the United States soaking up Yankee culture for the purpose of "enriching" your writing.

Ten Percent of Life by Hiber Conteris (Simon & Schuster: $15.95 cloth, $6.95 paper; 167 pages) If there is a heaven for hard-boiled writers, Raymond Chandler should be up there smiling. All through his life, Chandler--and Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Paul Cain, Raoul Whitfield and Horace McCoy, as well as their mentor, Capt.