Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter, born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, and remembered as one of the central makers of hardboiled detective fiction. He came to crime writing late. In 1932, at age 44, he lost his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression and turned to detective stories. His first short story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” appeared in Black Mask in 1933. Six years later, his first novel, The Big Sleep, introduced readers to Philip Marlowe.

Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime, with an eighth left in progress at his death and later completed by Robert B. Parker. The Big Sleep was followed by books including Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, The Lady in the Lake in 1943, and The Long Goodbye in 1953. All of his novels except Playback were made into motion pictures, some more than once. Marlowe, his private detective, became one of the best-known figures in the genre, often placed beside Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. Both characters were played on film by Humphrey Bogart.

His style grew from a life split between places, classes, and kinds of work. Chandler spent early childhood in Nebraska before his Irish-born mother took him to England in 1900 so he could receive a better education. He was classically educated at Dulwich College in London, spent time in Paris and Munich improving his foreign languages, and passed the British civil service examination. He worked briefly for the Admiralty, then resigned, uneasy with civil service life. He tried journalism at the Daily Express and wrote for The Westminster Gazette, while also publishing reviews and romantic poetry.

In 1912, Chandler returned to America and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he worked at modest jobs before finding steadier employment. During the First World War, he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, saw combat in the trenches in France, and was twice hospitalized with Spanish flu. After the war he returned to Los Angeles. His later years before fiction included work as a bookkeeper, auditor, and oil company executive. The break came when the Depression cost him that position, pushing him toward the pulp magazines and the detective form he would help define.

Chandler is counted, with Hammett, James M. Cain, and other Black Mask writers, as a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction. He was also a sharp critic of the form. His essay “The Simple Art of Murder” is regarded as a standard work in the field, especially for its view of the detective as honorable by instinct, neither tarnished nor afraid. That idea runs through Marlowe: wised up but hopeful, cynical but sentimental, tough but still measuring the world against good and evil. Chandler’s sentences still have force because they give style to disappointment without giving in to it.