What the description fails to mention is that Raymond Chandler did not allow this particular group of stories to be republished after their initial appearances in pulp magazines of the thirties.
The reason? These were the eight stories that Chandler cannibalized to form the substance and sub-plots of:
The Black Sleep [taken from "The Curtain" and "Killer In The Rain"],
Farewell My Lovely [using "The Man Who Liked Dogs", "Try The Girl" and "Mandarin's Jade"], and
The Lady In The Lake [assembled with "Bay City Blues", "Lady In The Lake", and "No Crime In The Mountains"],
the first, second and fourth, respectively, of his seven novels featuring the archetypal noir detective Philip Marlowe. (The High Window, The Little Sister and its follow-up The Long Goodbye were all wholly originated as novels, while Playback was rewritten from an unused treatment that did not originally have Marlowe as a character)
Several years after Chandler's death in 1959, Ballantine Books, which in the '60s and '70s had the licensing rights to Chandler's work, went ahead and published these as a group in the book we have here, Killer In The Rain.
Unfortunately, no publisher since has put these eight stories out again - neither Vintage, which publishes all seven novels as well as the contents of the three Ballantine collections of pre-novel short stories (The Simple Art Of Murder, Pick-Up On Noon Street, and Trouble Is My Business); even the two volume collected works published in handsome hardcover form by Library Of America, virtually complete in every other aspect, omits these stories, which leads one to wonder if the Chandler estate - such as it is - has reinstated Chandler's ban on the public having access to these stories - until such time as they truly become public domain.
With the trend towards longer copyright life -designed soley to keep uncreative marketing/publishing people making an easy living off work which, after the creator's death, should belong to the freely accesible world culture domain, instead of putting more effort into marketing the works of the living creators who most deserve the remuneration whilst still alive - many of us may not actually still be here when they can be published by anyone without restriction. So grab a copy of these original masterpieces while there are dealers still with copies!~ MannyLunch