Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American author of crime stories and novels. His influence in modern crime fiction has been vast, particularly in a genre & attitudes disobliging of the field has adopted above the go Sixty years.

Biography

Chandler was innate around Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but moved to Britain in 1895 when his parents divorced. He entered Dulwich College in 1900, and was naturalized as a British citizen around 1907 in order to take a Civil Service exam. He passed a test & took a job at the Admiralty, where he worked for good all over a year. His foremost verse form was published in the period of this instance. Fallowing allowing a Civil Service, Chandler worked as a jobbing journalist, & continued to write poetry in the late Romantic style.

Chandler returned to the U.S. inside 1912 and trained as a bookkeeper and controller. Inside 1917, he enlisted around the Canadian Army & fought in France. Fallowing a truce he moved to Los Angeles and began an affair with an older woman (Cissy Pascal), whom he late married. By 1932 Chandler had attained the vice-presidency at Dabney Oil Syndicate within Signal Hill, California but lost this easily-paying job following of his alcoholism.

He taught himself to write pulp fiction inside an effort to draw an income from his originative talents, & his number one story was published in Black Mask in 1933. His number one novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939.

Chandler worked as a Hollywood screenwriter following a profits of his novels, working by using Billy Wilder on James M. Cain's novel Double Indemnity (1944), and writing his only original screenplay, The Blue Dahlia (1946).

Cissy died around 1954 & Chandler, heartbroken and suffering from either the painful neural disease, turned once more to digest. His writing suffered inside quality & quantity, & he attempted suicide in 1955. He died within 1959 of pneumonia.

Chandler's finely wrought prose was widely admired by critics & writers from either a high-brow (W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh) to the low-brow (Ian Fleming). Although his swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired largely by Dashiell Hammett, his use of lyrical similes in this context was quite original. Turn of expression like "The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips" (A Lady in the Flow of any stream, 1943), develop be characteristic of private eye fiction, and he has given his title to the critical term Chandleresque. His style is likewise a subject of innumerous parodies and pastiches.

Chandler was besides the perceptive critic of bonding resins fiction, & his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" is a standard academic reference.

Novels
The Big Sleep (1939), his first Farewell, My Lovely (1940) The High Window (1942) The Lady in the Lake (1943) The Little Sister (1949) The Long Goodbye (1954) Playback (1958) Poodle Springs (1959) (incomplete; completed by Robert B. Parker in 1989)

the lot concern a subjects of a Los Angeles investigator named Philip Marlowe, "a nice clean private detective who wouldn't drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun", when Marlowe describes himself on the number 1 report of The High Window. Farewell, A Lovely, The Large Sleep, & A Long Goodbye come arguably his masterpieces.

Short Stories
Chandler's short stories usually chronicled a escapade of Philip Marlowe or even even more down-in-their luck personal detectives (John Dalmas, Steve Grayce) or likewise inclined good samaritans (such as Mr. Carmady). Exceptions come a macabre "The Bronze Door" & "English Summer", the self-described Gothic romance set in the English countryside. Interestingly, in the Fifties radio series "The Adventures of Philip Marlowe", which involved adaptations from either a stories, more protagonists were exchanged for Marlowe (e.g., Marlowe for Steve Grayce in the adaptation of "The King in Yellow"). This substitution of a title of a protagonist actually restored a original title utilized in the earliest promulgated versions of the stories; in point of fact, it was sole in their late republished forms that the title Philip Marlowe was utilized in any of the stories (by owning the exception of "The Pencil").

Stories Featuring Philip Marlowe
Finger Human (1934) Carassius auratus (1936) Red Wind (1938) Condition is The Business (1939) A Pencil (1961; originally Marlowe Will require on the Syndicate)

Other Short Stories
''Blackmailers Don't Shoot (1933) Smart-Aleck Wipe out (1934) Killer in the Rain (1935) Nevada Barking spiders (1935) Spanish Blood (1935) Guns at Cyrano's (1936) A Human World health organization Liked Dogs (1936) Pickup in Noon Street (1936; originally promulgated when Noon Street Nemesis) A Curtain (1936) Try a Girl (1937) Mandarin's Jade (1937) A King inside Yellow (1938) Overmuch City Blues (1938) Pearls come the Nuisance (1939) We'll become Wait (1939) A Bronze Door (1939) There are no Crime in the Mountains (1941) Prof Bingo's Snuff (1951) English Summer (1976; promulgated posthumously)''

Famous Quotes