Chandler, Raymond

Chandler, Raymond (Thornton)

(born July 23, 1888, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died March 26, 1959, La Jolla, Calif.) U.S. writer of detective fiction. Chandler worked as an oil-company executive in California before turning to writing during the Great Depression. Early short stories were followed by screenplays, including Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951). His character Philip Marlowe, a hard-boiled private detective working in the Los Angeles underworld, appears in all seven of his novels, including The Big Sleep (1939; film, 1946 and 1978), Farewell, My Lovely (1940; film Murder, My Sweet, 1944, and Farewell, My Lovely, 1975), and The Long Good-Bye (1953; film, 1973). Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are regarded as the classic authors of the hard-boiled genre.

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Chandler, Raymond (Thornton) (1888–1959) writer; born in Chicago. Taken to England by his mother at age nine, he was educated there and on the Continent. He worked as a journalist for English magazines and served in the Canadian army in World War I. Settling in the U.S.A. in 1919, he worked as a businessman, including ten years with the oil industry (1922–32), but with the publication of his first crime story in Black Mask magazine in 1933, he concentrated on writing. He created his hard-boiled sleuth, Phillip Marlowe, and tawdry underworld settings for his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939); Marlowe reappeared in subsequent works, including Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1954), which helped establish the American conventions of the genre. He moved between California and London in his later years.