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Raymond Thornton Chandler
Born	July 23, 1888(1888-07-23) Chicago, Illinois, USA
Died	March 26, 1959 (aged 70) San Diego, California, USA
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Writing period	1933-1959
Genres	Crime
Debut works	Novel: The Big Sleep (1939)

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an author of crime stories and novels of immense stylistic influence upon modern crime fiction, especially in the style of the writing and the attitudes now characteristic of the genre. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, is synonymous with "private detective", along with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Novels 3 Short stories 3.1 Detective short stories 3.2 Non-detective short stories 4 Published as 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but moved to Britain in 1895 with his Irish-born mother after they were abandoned by his father, an alcoholic civil engineer for an American railway company; they were supported by his uncle, a successful lawyer.^[1] In 1900, Chandler attended Dulwich College, London,^[1] where he was classically educated; he did not attend university, instead spending time in France and Germany. In 1907, he was naturalised as a British subject in order to take the Civil Service examination, which he passed with the third-highest score, and took an Admiralty job lasting slightly more than a year. His first poem was published during that time. Chandler disliked the servile mindset of the Civil Service and quit, to the consternation of his family. He then was an unsuccessful journalist, published reviews, and continued writing Romantic poetry. Accounting for that checkered time he said that "It was the age of the clever young man, but I was distinctly not a clever young man".^[2]

In 1912, he borrowed money from his uncle (who expected it repaid with interest), and returned to the U.S., eventually settling in Los Angeles. He strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and endured a lonely time of scrimping and saving. Finally, he took a correspondence bookkeeping course, finished ahead of schedule, and found a steady job. In 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, served in France, and was in flight training in England at war’s end.^[1]

In 1918, after the armistice, he returned to Los Angeles and began a love affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior.^[1] Six years later, in 1924, they married upon the death of his mother on September 26, 1923 (who had arrived in Los Angeles with him),^[3] who had opposed their union.^[1] By virtue of his American wife, Cissy, Raymond Chandler then was both a British subject and an American national. Moreover, by 1932, in the course of his bookkeeping career, he became a vice-president of the Dabney Oil syndicate, but, a year later, his alcoholism, absenteeism, and (at least) one threatened suicide^[1] provoked his firing.

To earn a living with his creative talent, he taught himself to write pulp fiction; his first story, “Blackmailers Don't Shoot”, was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933; his first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. Literary success led to Hollywood screenplay writer work: he and Billy Wilder co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944), based upon on James M. Cain's eponymous novel. His only original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia (1946). Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), a story he thought implausible. By then, the Chandlers had moved to La Jolla, California, a rich coastal town near San Diego.

In 1954, Cissy Chandler died of a long illness, during which time he wrote The Long Goodbye. Lonely and emotionally depressed, he returned to drink, never quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of the writing suffered.^[1] In 1955, he attempted suicide; literary scholars documented that suicide attempt. In The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (2007), Judith Freeman says it was “a cry for help”, given he called the police beforehand, saying he planned to kill himself. Raymond Chandler’s personal and professional life was both helped and complicated by the women to whom he was attracted — notably Helga Greene (his literary agent); Jean Fracasse (his secretary); Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's widow); and Natasha Spender (Stephen Spender's wife), the latter two of whom assumed Chandler to be a repressed homosexual.^[4] Note that Judith Freeman's book perpetuates errors dating back to the MacShane biography relating to the death of Florence Chandler and a number of residences.^[5]

After time in England he returned to La Jolla, where he died of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and pre-renal uremia in the Scripps Memorial Hospital per the death certificate. Helga Greene inherited the Chandler estate after a lawsuit with Jean Fracasse. Raymond Chandler was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego, California, U.S.A., per Frank MacShane, The Raymond Chandler Papers, Chandler directed he be buried next to Cissy, but was buried in the cemetery's Potter’s Field, because of the lawsuit over his estate.

Critics and writers, ranging from W.H. Auden to Evelyn Waugh to Ian Fleming greatly admired the finely wrought prose of Raymond Chandler.^[1] Although his swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired mostly by Dashiell Hammett, his sharp and lyrical similes are original: The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel; The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips, defining private eye fiction genre, and leading to the coining of the adjective Chandleresque, which is subject and object of parody and pastiche. Yet, Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical “tough guy”, but a complex, sometime sentimental man of few friends, who attended university, speaks some Spanish and, at times, admires Mexicans, is a student of classical chess games and classical music. He will refuse a prospective client’s money if he is ethically unsatisfied by the job.

Chandler’s short stories and novels are evocatively written, conveying the time, place, and ambience of Los Angeles and environs in the 1930s and 1940s.^[1] The places are real, if pseudonymous: Bay City is Santa Monica, Gray Lake is Silver Lake, and Idle Valley a synthesis of rich San Fernando Valley communities.

Raymond Chandler also was a perceptive critic of pulp fiction; his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” is the standard reference work in the field.

All of his novels have been cinematically adapted, notably The Big Sleep (1946), by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe; novelist William Faulkner was a co-screenplay writer. Raymond Chandler's few screen writing efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved stylistically and thematically influential upon the American film noir genre.

• 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 (1954) (Edgar Award for Best Novel, 1955)
• Playback (1958)
• Poodle Springs (1959) (incomplete; completed by Robert B. Parker in 1989)

These are the criminal cases of Philip Marlowe a Los Angeles private investigator. Their plots follow a pattern in which the men and women hiring him reveal themselves as corrupt, corrupting, and criminally complicit as those against whom he must protect his erstwhile employers.

Typically, the short stories chronicle the cases of Philip Marlowe and other down-on-their-luck private detectives (e.g. John Dalmas, Steve Grayce) or good samaritans (e.g. Mr Carmady). The exceptions are the macabre The Bronze Door and English Summer, a Gothic romance set in the English countryside.

Interestingly, in the 1950s radio series The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, that included adaptations of the short stories, the Philip Marlowe name was replaced with the names of other detectives, e.g. Steve Grayce, in The King in Yellow. In fact, such changes restored the stories to their originally published versions. It was later, when they were republished, as Philip Marlowe stories that the Philip Marlowe name was used, with the exception being The Pencil.

• Blackmailers Don't Shoot (1933)
• Smart-Aleck Kill (1934)
• Finger Man (1934)
• Killer in the Rain (1935)
• Nevada Gas (1935)
• Spanish Blood (1935)
• The Curtain (1936)
• Guns at Cyrano's (1936)
• Goldfish (1936)
• The Man Who Liked Dogs (1936)
• Pickup on Noon Street (1936; originally published as Noon Street Nemesis)
• Mandarin's Jade (1937)
• Try the Girl (1937)
• Bay City Blues (1938)
• The King in Yellow (1938)
• Red Wind (1938)
• The Lady in the Lake (1939)
• Pearls Are a Nuisance (1939)
• Trouble is My Business (1939)
• No Crime in the Mountains (1941)
• The Pencil (1959; published posthumously; originally published as Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate, also published as Wrong Pigeon and Philip Marlowe's Last Case)

Most of the short stories published before 1940 appeared in pulp magazines like Black Mask, and so had a limited readership. Chandler was able to recycle the plot lines and characters from those stories when he turned to writing novels intended for a wider audience.

• I'll Be Waiting (1939)
• The Bronze Door (1939)
• Professor Bingo's Snuff (1951)
• English Summer (1976; published posthumously)

I'll Be Waiting, The Bronze Door and Professor Bingo's Snuff all feature unnatural deaths and investigators (a hotel detective, Scotland Yard and California local police, respectively), but the emphasis is not on the investigation of the deaths.

Atlantic Monthly magazine articles:

• Writers in Hollywood (December 1944)
• The Simple Art of Murder (November 1945)
• Oscar Night in Hollywood (March 1948)
• Ten Percent of your Life (February 1952)

• Stories & Early Novels: Pulp Stories, The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window (Frank MacShane, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-1-88301107-9.
• Later Novels & Other Writings: The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback, Double Indemnity, Selected Essays & Letters (Frank MacShane, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-1-88301108-6.

• MacShane, Frank (1976). The Life of Raymond Chandler. N.Y.: E.P. Dutton.
• Hiney, Tom (1999). Raymond Chandler. N.Y.: Grove Press. ISBN 0-80213-637-0
• Ward, Elizabeth and Alain Silver (1987). Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. ISBN 0-87951-351-9
• Howe, Alexander N. "The Detective and the Analyst: Truth, Knowledge, and Psychoanalysis in the Hard-Boiled Fiction of Raymond Chandler." CLUES: A Journal of Detection 24.4 (Summer 2006): 15-29.
• Moss, Robert (2002) "Raymond Chandler A Literary Reference" New York Carrol & Graf
• Freeman,Judith (2007). The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. N.Y.:Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-375-42351-2 (0-375-42351-6)

• The Raymond Chandler website
• Raymond Chandler at the Internet Movie Database
• Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles Excerpts from the book by Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver
• Raymond Chandler Photo Portfolio Photographs of locations in Raymond Chandler's work, taken by Catherine Corman.
• Raymond Chandler's LA: In A Lonely Place tour from L.A. bus adventure company Esotouric
• Raymond Chandler at Thrilling Detective
• Bibliography of UK 1st Editions
• The Opposite of Show Business A play by Jim Grover about how Raymond Chandler became a writer.
• Writing The Long Goodbye
• 1996 Essay by George Pelecanos
• Recording of Ian Fleming’s interview of Raymond Chandler for BBC Radio, July 1958
• Raymond Chandler's Shamus Town A history of Los Angeles via the locations where Raymond Chandler lived and wrote about, 1912-1946.

v • d • e Works by Raymond Chandler
Novels:	The Big Sleep ♦ Farewell, My Lovely ♦ The High Window ♦ The Lady in the Lake ♦ The Little Sister ♦ The Long Goodbye ♦ Playback ♦ Poodle Springs
Characters:	Philip Marlowe
Short story collections:	Five Murderers ♦ Five Sinister Characters ♦ Fingerman and Other Stories ♦ The Simple Art of Murder ♦ Killer in the Rain ♦ Chandler Before Marlowe
Screenplays:	Double Indemnity ♦ And Now Tomorrow ♦ The Unseen ♦ The Blue Dahlia ♦ Strangers on a Train ♦ Playback
Non-fiction:	Raymond Chandler Speaking ♦ Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler
Film adaptations:	The Falcon Takes Over (1942) ♦ Murder, My Sweet (1944) ♦ The Big Sleep (1946) ♦ The Brasher Doubloon (1947) ♦ Lady in the Lake (1947) ♦ The Long Goodbye (1973) ♦ Farewell, My Lovely (1975) ♦ The Big Sleep (1978) ♦