Raymond Chandler, born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, emigrated with his family at the age of twelve to England, where he was educated at Dulwich College. He took a civil service job in London and contributed to literary weeklies. Dissatisfied with his progress as a writer, in 1912 he moved to Los Angeles and worked briefly as a bookkeeper before serving in the Canadian army and the R.A.F. in World War I. Upon his return to California, he took a job as an executive with an oil company and, in 1924, married Cissy Pascal, a pianist seventeen years his senior. After ten years at Dabney Oil, a period in which he wrote barely at all, he was fired for alcoholism. It was then that he turned to writing pulp detective stories, publishing his first at the age of forty-five in Black Mask. His first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939, sealed his membership in the hard-boiled school of crime fiction.

Philip Marlowe novels that followed were Farewell, My Lovely (1940); The High Window (1942); The Lady in the Lake (1943); and The Little Sister(1949). As a screenwriter, Chandler wrote The Blue Dahlia (1946) and coauthored Double Indemnity (1944) and Strangers on a Train (1951).

Raymond Chandler died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959.

Books by Raymond Chandler

The Long Goodbye

by Raymond Chandler