Raymond Chandler Biography Quotes 33 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Raymond Thornton Chandler was born on July 23, 1888, in Chicago, Illinois, to Maurice Benjamin Chandler and Florence Dart (Thornton). After his parents separated, he left the United States as a boy and settled in England with his mother. Educated at Dulwich College in London, he absorbed a classical curriculum that left him with lifelong literary ambitions and an ear for exacting prose. He briefly tried his hand at civil service and journalism in Britain, publishing poems and essays, but he did not find a secure vocation there. In 1912 he returned to North America, eventually making his way to California, where Los Angeles would become both his home and the landscape of his imagination.

War Service and Early Employment
With the outbreak of World War I, Chandler enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1917. He served in France and later trained with the Royal Flying Corps, experiences that gave him a disciplined sense of observation and a sober view of human frailty. After the war he returned to Los Angeles and entered the oil business, working as an executive with a local company at a time when petroleum was remaking Southern California. He excelled for a period, but heavy drinking and personal struggles undermined his position. In 1932 he was dismissed from his post, a crisis that forced him to reconsider his ambitions and set him on the path to professional writing.

Turning to the Pulps
Chandler taught himself the mechanics of crime fiction by studying the hardboiled masters who were redefining American popular literature. He admired Dashiell Hammett's unsentimental clarity and learned to compress action and character into swift, economical scenes. In 1933 he published his first story in Black Mask, the pulp magazine shaped by editor Joseph Shaw. Through a series of stories he developed a distinctive voice: wry, laconic, and elaborately metaphorical. The Los Angeles streets he described had the grimy sheen of reality, but his cadences were literary, fusing slang with classical poise.

Philip Marlowe and the Novels
His first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), introduced Philip Marlowe, a private detective whose stoic integrity stood against corruption in a city of bright surfaces and dark arrangements. Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The High Window (1942) followed in quick succession, expanding Marlowe's world and deepening the moral ambiguities at its core. The Lady in the Lake (1943) explored murder in rural settings as well as the city, while The Little Sister (1949) brought Hollywood's illusions into the frame. The Long Goodbye (1953), often regarded as Chandler's finest novel, confronted loss, loyalty, and betrayal with a melancholy reach that exceeded the conventions of genre. Playback (1958) returned Marlowe to a coastal town, its lean plot offset by the ruminative tone of a writer in late career. Chandler also wrote essays on the craft, most notably The Simple Art of Murder, in which he argued for a detective story rooted in plausibility and moral seriousness.

Style and Method
Chandler's prose became famous for similes that snapped with surprise yet felt inevitable once read, and for dialogue that made even minor characters vivid. He revised meticulously, sometimes recasting earlier short stories into novel chapters, which gave his plots their mosaic quality. While he made use of intricate puzzles, he cared more about mood, character, and the corrosive effects of power than about tidy solutions. His fictional Los Angeles was a living map of real neighborhoods, hotels, oil fields, and foothills, a place where the glare of sun could be as blinding as night.

Hollywood and Collaboration
Chandler's reputation brought him to Hollywood during the 1940s. He co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944) with director Billy Wilder, a collaboration that was fractious yet fruitful, yielding one of the classic scripts of film noir and an Academy Award nomination. He wrote the original screenplay for The Blue Dahlia (1946), produced by John Houseman, earning another Oscar nomination. He also worked, sometimes uncomfortably, within the studio system on projects such as Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, where disagreements over tone and structure became part of lore. Hollywood gave him financial security and sharpened his sense of dialogue and pacing, even as he chafed at the compromises it demanded. His agent H. N. Swanson managed his studio dealings, while his later literary agent Helga Greene handled his book career and, eventually, his estate.

Personal Life
In 1924 Chandler married Cissy (Pearl Eugenie) Hurlburt, who was many years his senior. Their partnership was central to his stability; she read his drafts, shared his rhythms, and anchored his household. Alcohol, however, remained a persistent problem, complicating his work and relationships. Cissy's death in 1954 devastated him, and the years that followed were marked by depression, illness, and uneven productivity. He stayed in touch with friends and colleagues in the literary and film worlds, and he corresponded widely, leaving letters that reveal a mind by turns sardonic and tender.

Later Years and Death
In the 1950s Chandler's health declined, but he continued to write and to travel between California and Britain. Playback appeared in 1958, and he also began Poodle Springs, a Marlowe novel left unfinished at his death. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. His passing, coming after years of strain, closed a career that had transformed the detective story from a vehicle of puzzle-solving into a medium for American social portraiture.

Legacy
Chandler's influence is vast. He helped define hardboiled fiction and, with it, the contours of film noir. His Philip Marlowe became a template for the lone, ethically burdened investigator who walks, in his words, down mean streets without becoming mean. Writers such as Ross Macdonald and, later, Robert B. Parker absorbed his lessons about voice, setting, and moral tension, while filmmakers continued to mine his cadences and characters. The Los Angeles he rendered remains one of literature's most persuasive cityscapes, animated by a sense that glamour and decay are twin aspects of the same dream. Chandler left relatively few novels, but each line bears the mark of a stylist who believed that genre, at its best, could carry the full freight of art.

Our collection contains 33 quotes who is written by Raymond, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Justice - Writing - Art.

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