About Me
Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but moved to Britain in 1895 with his mother after they were abandoned by his father, an alcoholic civil engineer for an American railway company. His mother's brother, a successful lawyer, supported them. Chandler entered Dulwich College in London in 1900, where he received a classical education. He did not attend university, instead spending time in Europe. He was naturalised as a British citizen in 1907 in order to take the Civil Service exam. He passed with the third highest score and took a job at the Admiralty, where he worked for just over a year. His first poem was published during this time. Chandler disliked the Civil Service's mindset of servility and quit, to the consternation of his family. Chandler unsuccessfully tried journalism, published some reviews, and continued to write poetry in the late Romantic style. It was the age of the Clever Young Man, but "I was distinctly not a clever young man," he later said of himself.[citation needed]
In 1912, after borrowing money from his uncle (who made it clear the loan was to be repaid, with interest), Chandler returned to the United States and eventually settled in Los Angeles. He found work stringing tennis rackets and picking fruit. It was a lonely period of scrimping and saving. Finally taking a correspondence course in bookkeeping, he finished ahead of schedule and found steady employment. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, served in France, and was in flight training in England when the war ended.
After the armistice of 1918 he returned to Los Angeles and began an affair with a married woman, Cissy Pascal, who was 18 years his senior. They married in 1924 upon the death of Chandler's mother, whom he had brought to Los Angeles and who opposed the union. By virtue of his American wife Chandler now had both British and American nationalities. By 1932 Chandler had attained a vice-presidency at the Dabney Oil syndicate but a year later his alcoholism, absenteeism, and at least one suicide threat got him fired.
He taught himself to write pulp fiction in an effort to draw an income from his creative talents, and his first story, Blackmailers Don't Shoot was published in Black Mask in 1933. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939.
Chandler worked as a Hollywood screenwriter following the success of his novels, working with Billy Wilder on James M. Cain's novel Double Indemnity (1944), and writing his only original screenplay, The Blue Dahlia (1946). Chandler also collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), a story he thought implausible. By this time the Chandlers had moved to La Jolla, California, an affluent enclave on the coast near San Diego.
Chandler's wife died in 1954 after a long illness, during which Chandler was writing The Long Goodbye. Lonely and depressed, he turned once again to drink and never again turned away for long. His writing suffered in quality and quantity, and he attempted suicide in 1955.[citation needed] His life was both helped and complicated by the women who attracted his attention, notably Helga Greene (his literary agent); Jean Fracasse (his secretary); and Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's widow), who assumed Chandler was a repressed homosexual.[citation needed] After a stay in England he moved back to La Jolla where he died, of alcoholism and pneumonia, at the Scripps Clinic. Helga Greene was awarded his estate after a legal wrangle with Fracasse. Chandler was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, in San Diego. According to Frank MacShane, the author of The Raymond Chandler Papers, the struggle over his estate resulted in Chandler being interred in a section reserved for paupers and indigents.
Chandler's finely wrought prose was widely admired by critics and writers from W.H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh to Ian Fleming. Although his swift-moving, hardboiled style was inspired largely by Dashiell Hammett, his use of both sharp and lyrical similes in this context was quite original. Turns of phrase such as The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, and The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips, defines private eye fiction and a Chandleresque literary style, which is also the subject and object of innumerable parodies and pastiches. However, his most famous character, Philip Marlowe, is not a stereotypical tough guy, but rather a complex and sometimes sentimental figure who has few friends, attended college for a while, speaks a little Spanish, at times admires Mexicans, and is a student of chess and classical music. He will also refuse money from a prospective client if he is not satisfied that the job meets his ethical standards.
In his short stories and novels Chandler wrote very evocatively of Los Angeles and its environs in the 1930s and '40s. Many of the locations which he describes are real, some pseudonymous: "Bay City" is generally taken to represent Santa Monica, "Gray Lake" was the analog for Silver Lake, while "Idle Valley" is a synthesis of various wealthy enclaves in the San Fernando Valley.
Chandler was also a perceptive critic of pulp fiction, and his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" is a standard reference.
All of Chandler's novels have been adapted for film, most notably The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Novelist William Faulkner also received a screenwriting credit for this film. Chandler's screenwriting, as limited as it was, and the adaptation of his novels to screen in the 1940s were important influences on American film noir.
