An american motion picture screen writer and author of detective fiction. In the evolution of the detective story, he is ranked with Dashiell Hammett as the leading figure in the "hard-boiled" school of the 1920's and 1930's.
Background
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, but he grew up in England after the divorce of his parents. His mother, Florence, had married a Quaker railroadman, Maurice Chandler, while visiting her sister in Omaha. Chandler lived with his mother, grandmother, and aunt in Auckland Road, Upper Norwood, in south London.
Education
He attended Dulwich College, which was within a longish walking distance of Upper Norwood, and studied then international law in France and Germany.
Career
Chandler began writing stories for crime fiction magazine Black Mask, which also published Dashiell Hammett's stories. He is best known for his tough but honest private detective Philip Marlowe, the name originating from the English 16th century writer Christopher Marlowe, who had a violent temper. As representative and master of hard-boiled school of crime fiction, Chandler criticized classical puzzle writers for their lack of realism. His most famous target in much quoted essay The Simple Art of Murder (1944) was A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery. He worked as an assistant stores officer in the Naval Supplies Branch, a temporary teacher at Dulwich College, and published poems and essays in the Academy, the Chamber's Journal, and Westminster Gazette. In a poem, which appeared in the Westminster Gazette in 1909, he wrote: "Come with me, love, / Across the world, / Ere glory fades / And wings are furled, / And we will wander hand in hand, / Like a boy and girl in a playroom land." Later Chandler characterized his early poetry as 'Grade B Georgian'. Before returning to the United States in 1912, Chandler published twenty-seven poems and his first story, 'The Rose-Leaf Romance.' Back in America he worked in St. Louis, then on a ranch, in a sporting goods firm, and as a bookkeeper in a creamery. During the World War I he served in the Canadian Army (1917-18), and was later transferred to the Royal Air Force (1918-19). After the war Chandler worked in a bank in San Francisco, wrote for the Daily Express, and become then a bookkeeper and auditor for Dabney Oil Syndicate from 1922 to 1932. When Chandler lost his job during the Great Depression - he was fired for drinking and absenteeism - he began writing stories for Black Mask Magazine. At the age of forty-five, with the support of his wife, Chandler devoted himself entirely to writing. He prepared himself for his first submission by carefully studying Erle Stanley Gardner and other representatives of pulp fiction, and spent five months writing his first story, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot.' It appeared in December 1933 in Black Mask, the foremost among magazines publishing in the hard-boiled school.
Chandler was a slow writer. Between 1933 and 1939 he produced a total of nineteen pulp stories, eleven in Black Mask, seven in Dime Detective, one in Detective Fiction Weekly. Unlike most of his pulp-writing colleagues, Chandler tried to expand the limits of the pulp formula to more ambitious and humane direction. His fourth published story, 'Killer in the Rain,' was used in THE BIG SLEEP (1939), Chandler's first novel.
Achievements
Works
book
Five Murderers
Five Sinister Characters
Fingerman and Other Stories
The Simple Art of Murder
Killer in the Rain
The Midnight Raymond Chandler
Trouble is My Business
Pickup on Noon Street
Spanish Blood
movie
Time to Kill (1942)
The Falcon Takes Over (1942)
Murder, My Sweet (1944)
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Lady in the Lake (1947)
Marlowe (1969)
The Long Goodbye (1973)
Farewell, My Lovely (1975)
The Big Sleep (1978)
Poodle Springs (1998)
non-fiction
Raymond Chandler Speaking
Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler
novel
The Big Sleep (1939)
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
The High Window (1942)
The Lady in the Lake (1943)
The Little Sister (1949)
The Long Goodbye
Playback (1958)
Poodle Springs (1959)
screenplay
The Blue Dahlia
Double Indemnity
Strangers on a Train
Playback (Unproduced)
And Now Tomorrow
The Unseen
Connections
In 1924 he married
18-years older Pearl Cecily Hurlburt, twice married and divorced. When
she wed Chandler she was fifty-three, but looked far younger and listed
her age as forty-three. When his wife died in 1954 Chandler was devastated. He sailed for
England and met Jessica Tyndale, a banker, on board, and they became