Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in
Chicago in
1888, but raised and educated in
England. He returned to the
United States in 1912, took to writing
crime fiction during the
Depression (having lost his job due to
alcohol and absence) and died in
California in
1959.
Chandler took after
Dashiell Hammett in rejecting the parlor-
puzzleism of
English mystery stories, instead writing "
gritty", realistic, and
morally ambiguous fiction with real live characters. Yadda yadda "
hard boiled" etc. Chandler was trying to write worthwhile
literature in the "
crime fiction" genre; I have no idea why anybody would want to do a thing like that, but he did it, and it worked. Chandler famously
slagged off English mysteries in his essay "
The Simple Art of Murder" (
1944).
His novels all concern the
private investigator Philip Marlowe, parts of whom have become, as Mr. Harward says, a
genre stereotype:
Marlowe is witty, idealistic, honorable,
alcoholic, generally penniless, and frequently struck on the head with
blunt instruments.
Marlowe is also a
pipe-smoker, a chess player, and widely read, but those features don't seem to have fired the public imagination in quite the same way as the wit, the
whiskey, and the
head wounds.
Leaving out
short fiction (most not featuring
Marlowe), Chandler wrote the following novels:
- The Big Sleep (1939) (movified 1946, also some time in the 1970s IIRC)
- Farewell, My Lovely (1940) (movified 1944, 1975)
- The High Window (1942) (movified as The Brasher Doubloon, 1946)
- The Lady in the Lake (1943) (movified 1946)
- The Little Sister (1949) (movified as Marlowe, 1969)
- The Long Goodbye (1953) (movified 1973)
- Playback (1958)
Chandler also worked on the script for the movification of
James M. Cain's
Double Indemnity (
1944), and the script of
Alfred Hitchcock's
1951 adaptation of
Patricia Highsmith's novel
Strangers on a Train. (The same
Patricia Highsmith whose
The Talented Mr. Ripley was hammered into an unrecognizable mess this year by the
midgets who swarm in
Hollywood where
Hitchcock once ran free. A-hem.) Chandler had a lot of problems with
Strangers on a Train and ended up changing it significantly.
Highsmith was always cavalier about
motivation, and Chandler had...
issues with that. Chandler also wrote an original
screenplay,
The Blue Dahlia, in
1946, which was produced.
Chandler died while writing his last novel,
Poodle Springs. It was completed by
Robert B. Parker in
1989, and has been published.
Chandler's "best
novel" is really a matter of "
personal preference"; had I to choose one, it'd be
The Long Goodbye.
For random interest,
William Faulkner and
SF legend
Leigh Brackett both worked on the script for
The Big Sleep in
1944.