Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23,1888. Author of classic detective novels.



Parents separated when he was 12 - mother took 7 year-old son to London. Went to Dulwich College. Wrote poetry as a teenager.

Studied in France and Germany before returning to London and reluctantly taking up a post in the civil Service. Didn't like it and left to work as a freelance journalist and writer

Left London at 24 (1912) - back to USA. Served in the Canadian Army in WWI (began drinking? Began writing prose?).


Returned to California - job in oil company. Early success, but drank heavily. Began writing stories for pulp mags. Finally succeeded in getting himself fired (drinking was affecting his work!) and was free to write full time at last.

1924 married Cissy Pascal
1932, Mid-forties unemployed.


During the Thirties, had 16 stories published in various pulp magazines including Black Mask. However, it was another seven years before he achieved major success with the publication of the full length novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Quickly followed up with Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, The High Window in 1942 and The Lady in the Lake in 1943. All featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe

The English whodunnit might be "lithe and clever" but American mystery fiction is "dark and full of blood."


"In England I am an author... in the US just a mystery writer."

1953 with The Long Goodbye. A year later, Chandler's wife of thirty years, Cissy, died. After five years of relative inactivity, Chandler followed her on the 26th of March 1959 - despite the level of success he achieved, he believed he had never written anything truly worthy of Cissy.

Philip Marlowe - Private Investigator

The Big Sleep. Bogart. Fame and Fortune! This was the first outing for the seminal private detective Phillip Marlowe. Marlowe was the original world-weary, wisecracking noir hero - the hard boiled, rough and tumble gumshoe who has no illusions about human nature but is fundamentally decent and honest.

Died aged 70 in 1959.


Times obituary said "in working the vein of crime fiction (he) mined the gold of literature."

Chandler's Dames

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."

After the subsequent books Farewell My Lovely, The High Window and The Lady in the Lake were released, both Marlowe and Chandler were household names. Later, working in Hollywood, Chandler earned an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of the novel Double Indemnity. Marlowe made his final appearances in 1949 with The Little Sister and

Raymond Chandler's books, despite belonging to a genre usually sniffed at by the literary establishment, were widely loved and enormously successful. The noted English critic W.H.Auden wrote that they were 'serious studies of a criminal milieu, The Great Wrong Place, and his powerful yet extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art'.

They have all, at one time or other, been made into successful motion pictures, and their enromous influence on noirish fiction in all mediums is indisputable. Chandler's detective was, at the time, a revolutionary new kind of hero which today we take for granted. Cynical, sarcastic, alcoholic, occasionally violent - one of the earliest modern anti heroes.