An American novelist, writer of crime fiction featuring the private
detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond (Thornton) Chandler was born in
Chicago of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. He moved to
England when his parents divorced. He attended Dulwich College and
studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in
1907 and becoming a naturalized British subject. He took a civil
service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to
America, settling in California. After the US entered World War I he
enlisted in the Canadian Army, then transferred to the Royal Flying
Corps. After the armistice he returned to California and got a series
of bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney
Oil syndicate.
All along, however, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and
essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the
bottom fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to
writing full-time. He found a niche with stories of the "hard-boiled"
school popularized by Dashiell Hammett,
and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask, the same
mystery magazine that had first published Hammett. His first four
novels--"The Big Sleep" (1939, filmed 1946
[Tote schlafen fest (1946)] and 1978
[Der tiefe Schlaf (1978)]); "Farewell
My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944
[Mord, mein Liebling (1944)] and
1975
[Fahr zur Hölle, Liebling (1975)]);
"The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947
[The Brasher Doubloon (1947)]);
and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946
[Die Dame im See (1946)])--which
reworked plots from some of his short stories, were his most
successful.
He spent some time in Hollywood as a screenwriter, contributing to
Billy Wilder's
Frau ohne Gewissen (1944), the
film noir classic
Die blaue Dahlie (1946) and
Alfred Hitchcock's
Der Fremde im Zug (1951).
He wrote realistically, in stark contrast to the English style of
drawing-room puzzle mysteries where an amateur detective always knows
more than the police and clues turn up at just the right moment.
Chandler dismissed these plots as "having God sit in your lap."
