Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888. His alcoholic father abandoned the family in the early 1890s, and in 1900 his mother took him to England, where he got a classical education at Dulwich College in London. He became a British subject in 1907 so he could sit the civil service examination, passed it, took a job at the Admiralty, and quit after a little over a year because he couldn’t stand the servility.
He died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959. In between he fought in France with the Canadian army, spent ten years climbing to vice president of a Los Angeles oil company, lost the job, and invented Philip Marlowe. Every hardboiled narrator since has borrowed something from Marlowe, whether the writer knows it or not.
The career started late and ran short. Seven novels in his lifetime, the first at fifty, the last at sixty-nine.
Why did Raymond Chandler start writing at forty-four?
Because the Dabney Oil Syndicate fired him.
The road to that office ran through a war. Chandler had drifted back to America, and in August 1917 he enlisted in Victoria, British Columbia, with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He saw combat in France with the 7th Battalion, was hospitalized twice with Spanish flu, and was in Royal Air Force flight training when the war ended. Then he came back to California, settled in Los Angeles and went into business.
He’d joined the company in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor and was a vice president by 1931. A year later he was out, dismissed for drinking, absenteeism, affairs with women in the office and threats of suicide. It was 1932 and the Depression was at its worst. He was forty-four with no job, a drinking problem and a wife eighteen years older than he was. He’d lost the only career he had.
He decided to write for the pulps.
The pulp magazines paid by the word, bought a lot of material and asked no questions about where a writer had come from. Chandler taught himself the form by analyzing a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner and imitating it, the way an art student copies a painting to learn the brushwork. His first sale, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” appeared in Black Mask in 1933. He was forty-five.
Plenty of people believe the window for writing a first book closes at some age. Chandler’s first novel came out at fifty.
I started in computers in 1981. Before I got serious about books, I maintained websites with roughly 5,000 to 6,000 hand-coded HTML pages, and I’ve written about the supposed age limit in you’re not too old or too young to write a book. Chandler is the best evidence for that argument in American fiction.
What did Raymond Chandler learn from the pulp magazines?
Speed, mostly, and the need to keep a reader turning pages for a magazine that would drop him if the readers didn’t come back. He also learned to write scenes that worked as scenes, with an entrance, a threat and a turn.
Years later he wrote about that period with a mix of affection and embarrassment. In a 1950 piece for the Saturday Review of Literature, he summed up the pulp method in one line.
“When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”
He meant it as a confession about the old stories. They crammed action into too little time and too few characters, and the gunman at the door was a way out of a corner. Writers have been quoting the line as advice ever since.
It works as advice, with limits. A stalled plot will lurch back into motion when a threat walks into the room. The trouble starts when a writer uses the gun to dodge a scene that needs thinking through. Chandler’s novels have plenty of men with guns, and the best chapters in them are conversations.
How did Raymond Chandler build The Big Sleep from old stories?
He took apart his own pulp work and reassembled it. The core of The Big Sleep comes from two stories, “Killer in the Rain” from 1935 and “The Curtain” from 1936, with smaller pieces of other stories mixed in. Chandler called the method cannibalizing. The finished novel came out from Alfred A. Knopf in 1939.
The opening is famous for good reason. “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain” in the foothills, and Marlowe is calling on a millionaire in his powder-blue suit. Then he sums himself up: “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.”
In two sentences Chandler tells you the man drinks, has a client worth dressing up for, and doesn’t care what you think.
The cannibalizing shows in the plot. Two stories with two sets of characters and two crimes don’t fuse cleanly, and the joins are visible to anybody looking for them. Chandler decided the voice mattered more than the mechanics, and the readers agreed with him.
A writer sitting on a drawer full of old short stories should take the hint. Material that didn’t work alone can work as a chapter in something bigger, and a novelist who throws out old work is throwing out free raw material. Chandler built his first and most famous novel almost entirely out of magazine stories he’d already been paid for, and did it again a year later with Farewell, My Lovely, stitched together from three more.
Who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep?
Nobody knows, including the author, according to the best-known story about the book.
A chauffeur named Owen Taylor turns up dead in a car pulled out of the ocean, and the novel never settles whether he was murdered or killed himself, or by whom. When Howard Hawks filmed the book in 1946, the writers working on the script got stuck on the question and asked Chandler. He told them he had no idea. The anecdote can’t be fully confirmed, but it fits what anyone can see on the page.
I love twisty plots set up with small hints, the kind where the solution has been sitting in plain view since chapter three, and that’s the opposite of how Chandler worked. He didn’t care much about the solution. He cared about the man walking through the case, the people he met, and the city they lived in. The Big Sleep survives the loose end because nobody reads it for the puzzle.
The film is its own pleasure, and the site’s review of The Big Sleep (1946) covers how Hawks handled the tangle.
How does Raymond Chandler’s prose style work?
A first-person narrator with a wisecrack for every room.
Marlowe describes people with comparisons nobody else would make, comic and exact at once, and the jokes do the characterization. A reader learns more about a woman from Marlowe’s simile than from a paragraph of physical description.
Underneath the wisecracks sits a plain declarative sentence that comes out of the same American tradition as Hemingway. Chandler’s background gave him something extra. He’d had a classical education in London and spent time in Paris and Munich working on his languages, and he wrote American slang like a man who’d collected it on purpose.
Raymond Chandler was fired from an oil company at forty-four, sold his first story at forty-five, and published The Big Sleep at fifty. Start late. Start anyway.Share on X
His dialogue earned the respect of other professionals. Ian Fleming, in a radio discussion with him, said Chandler offered “some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today.” The tags stay plain. I use said, answered and replied for my own tags and keep adverbs out of them, a rule I’ve written about in Elmore Leonard’s rules of writing, and Chandler’s dialogue shows why the rule holds.
When the line is right, the tag has nothing to add.
The danger of the style is that it’s easy to copy badly. A thousand imitators have produced the similes without the sadness underneath them, and the result reads like parody. Marlowe’s jokes work because he’s lonely and knows it.
What did Raymond Chandler argue in The Simple Art of Murder?
In December 1944 The Atlantic published his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” an attack on the English country-house mystery and a defense of the American hardboiled story. He argued that the classic puzzle mystery was artificial, with murders committed by impossible methods for the convenience of the plot. He held up Dashiell Hammett as the writer who had put murder back among the people who really commit it. Hammett had come up through Black Mask too.
Its most quoted line describes the detective the new fiction needed: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
The essay is unfair to the English writers, and it’s still worth reading for anybody writing crime. Its real target is fiction where the plot moves the people around like furniture. Chandler wanted characters who would do what the writer needed for reasons of their own.
What did Raymond Chandler write for Hollywood?
He co-wrote the screenplay for Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder in 1944, adapting James M. Cain’s novel, and it earned an Academy Award nomination. Wilder said he guided the structure and wrote much of the dialogue, and he also credited Chandler with the lines people remember. The site’s review of Double Indemnity (1944) goes through why it holds up.
His only produced original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia in 1946. He hadn’t written an ending, the studio needed one, and according to the producer, John Houseman, Chandler said he could only finish it drunk. Houseman agreed and arranged secretaries and drivers around the clock while Chandler drank his way to the last page. The script earned his second Oscar nomination. He also worked on Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train in 1951 and disliked the story he’d been given.
The Blue Dahlia story gets told as a funny Hollywood anecdote. It’s a man who’d been fired for drinking more than a decade earlier drinking on purpose to meet a deadline, with a studio paying for it.
What does not hold up in Raymond Chandler?
The plots wander, and a few of them never resolve.
The women are a bigger problem. They’re mostly predators or prizes, and the novels see them almost entirely through Marlowe’s wary, wisecracking eye. The books also carry the casual racial and sexual attitudes of 1940s Los Angeles, and a modern reader will hit passages that land badly. Marlowe himself reads at times like a fantasy of the incorruptible man, exactly the hero the Atlantic essay asked for.
The later life is hard reading. He’d married Pearl Eugenie “Cissy” Pascal on February 6, 1924, and they stayed together for thirty years. She died in 1954 after a long illness, and the last years were lonely and full of drink. The Long Goodbye, published in 1953 while she was ill, is the most personal of the novels and the strongest of the seven.
Playback, from 1958, is the weakest, built from a screenplay he’d written for Universal that never got made. He left four chapters of another Marlowe novel, and Robert B. Parker finished it as Poodle Springs in 1989.
How should you mark Raymond Chandler Day?
Read The Big Sleep in one sitting, the way the pulp readers took a story, and ignore the plot when it gets lost. Then read The Long Goodbye to see what the voice could do when he slowed it down. If you only have an evening, read “The Simple Art of Murder” and argue with it.
If you’re writing crime or anything with a first-person narrator, try his apprenticeship. Take a story you admire, rewrite it in your own words, and compare the two line by line. When the book is ready for an outside eye, that’s the work of book coaching.
The detective story Chandler spent his career arguing with goes back to Arthur Conan Doyle, and every birthday worth marking is on the literature-related holidays calendar.