Raymond 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; they were supported by his mother's brother, a successful lawyer. In 1900, Chandler attended
Dulwich College, London, where he was classically educated; he did not attend university, instead spending time in Continental Europe. In 1907, he was naturalised as a British subject in order to take the
Civil Service examination, which he passed with the third-highest score, and took an
Admiralty job lasting slightly more than a year. His first poem was published during that time. Chandler disliked the servile mindset of the Civil Service and quit, to the consternation of his family. He then was an unsuccessful journalist, published reviews, and continued writing
Romantic poetry. Accounting for that checkered time, of himself, he said that it was the age of
The Clever Young Man, but, “I was distinctly
not a clever young man”.
In 1912, he borrowed money from his uncle (who expected it repaid with interest), and returned to the U.S., eventually settling in Los Angeles. He strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and endured a lonely time of scrimping and saving. Finally, he took a correspondence bookkeeping course, finished ahead of schedule, and found a steady job. In 1917, when the U.S. entered
World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian Army, served in
France, and was in flight training in England at war’s end.
In 1918, after the armistice, he returned to
Los Angeles and began a love affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior. Six years later, in 1924, they married upon the the death of his mother (whom he’d taken with him to Los Angeles) who had opposed their union. By virtue of his American wife, Cissy, Raymond Chandler then was both a British subject and an American national. Moreover, by 1932, in the course of his bookkeeping career, he became a vice-president of the Dabney Oil syndicate, but, a year later, his alcoholism, absenteeism, and (at least) one threatened suicide provoked his firing.
To earn a living with his creative talent, he taught himself to write
pulp fiction; his first story, “Blackmailers Don't Shoot”, was published in
Black Mask magazine in 1933; his first novel,
The Big Sleep, was published in
1939. Literary success led to
Hollywood screenplay writer work: he and
Billy Wilder co-wrote
Double Indemnity (
1944), based upon on
James M. Cain's eponymous novel. His only original screenplay was
The Blue Dahlia (1946). Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of
Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), a story he thought implausible. By then, the Chandlers had moved to
La Jolla, California, a rich coastal town near San Diego.
In 1954, Cissy Chandler died of a long illness, during which time he wrote
The Long Goodbye. Lonely and emotionally depressed, he returned to drink, never quiting it for long, and the quality and quantity of the writing suffered. In 1955, he attempted suicide; literary scholars documented that suicide attempt. In
The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (2007), Judith Freeman says it was “a cry for help”, given he called the police beforehand, saying he planned to kill himself. Raymond Chandler’s personal and professional lives were helped and complicated by the women to whom he was attracted — notably Helga Greene (his literary agent); Jean Fracasse (his secretary); and Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's widow), who assumed him a repressed homosexual.
After time in England he returned to La Jolla, where he died of of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and pre-renal uremia in the Scripps Memorial Hospital per the death certificate. Helga Greene inherited the Chandler estate after a lawsuit with Jean Fracasse. Raymond Chandler was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego, California, U.S.A., per Frank MacShane,
The Raymond Chandler Papers, Chandler directed he be buried next to Cissy, but was buried in the cemetery's
Potter’s Field, because of the lawsuit over his estate.
Critics and writers, ranging from
W.H. Auden to
Evelyn Waugh to
Ian Fleming greatly admired the finely-wrought prose of Raymond Chandler. Although his swift-moving,
hardboiled style was inspired mostly by
Dashiell Hammett, his sharp and lyrical
similes are original:
The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel;
The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips, defining
private eye fiction genre, and leading to the coining of the adjective
Chandleresque, which is subject and object of
parody and
pastiche. Yet, Philip Marlowe is not a stereotypical “tough guy”, but a complex, sometime sentimental man of few friends, who attended university, speaks some Spanish and, at times, admires Mexicans, is a student of classical chess games and classical music. He will refuse a prospective client’s money if he is ethically unsatisfied by the job.
Chandler’s short stories and novels are evocatively written, conveying the time, place, and ambience of
Los Angeles and environs in the 1930s and 1940s. The places are real, if pseudonymous: Bay City is
Santa Monica, Gray Lake is
Silver Lake, and Idle Valley a synthesis of rich
San Fernando Valley communities.
Raymond Chandler also was a perceptive critic of pulp fiction; his essay “
The Simple Art of Murder” is the standard reference work in the field.
All of the his novels have been cinematically adapted, notably
The Big Sleep (1946), by
Howard Hawks, with
Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe; novelist
William Faulkner was a co-screenplay writer. Raymond Chandler's few screen writing efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved stylistically and thematically influential upon the American
film noir genre.
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