- Born
- Died
- Birth nameRaymond Thornton Chandler
- 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 [The Big Sleep (1946)] and 1978 [The Big Sleep (1978)]); "Farewell My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944 [Murder, My Sweet (1944)] and 1975 [Farewell, My Lovely (1975)]); "The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947 [The Brasher Doubloon (1947)]); and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946 [Lady in the Lake (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 Double Indemnity (1944), the film noir classic The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (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."- IMDb Mini Biography By: Paul F. Wilson (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)
- SpousePearl Eugenia "Cissy" Hurlburt(February 6, 1924 - December 12, 1954) (her death)
- Specialised in hard-boiled crime noir.
- Tough guy protagonists.
- Encouraged Ian Fleming to continue writing his James Bond novels in the mid 1950s by writing a few words of recommendation to Fleming's American publishers.
- He was once asked how he felt about Hollywood 'ruining' his books at which point he led the person who asked him into his study, pointed to his works and said 'They're right there. They're fine'.
- He was 50 years old when his first novel was published.
- He gave up writing at the age of 22 after the suicide of his friend Richard Middleton. Chandler felt that, if someone as talented as Middleton couldn't make it, he didn't have a chance.
- Died midway through writing his last Philip Marlowe novel, "Poodle Springs," in 1959. More than three decades later, it was completed by Chandler admirer Robert B. Parker (author of the "Spenser" novels), and became a best-seller.
- If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
- Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.
- I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.
- The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
- Hollywood has all the personality of a paper cup.
- Strangers on a Train (1951) - $2,500 a week for five weeks
- Lady in the Lake (1947) - $35 .000 for screen rights
- The Big Sleep (1946) - $10,000 for screen rights
- The Unseen (1945) - $1,000 @week
- Murder, My Sweet (1945) - $2,000 for screen rights
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