Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888–1959) was born on 23 July 1888 in Chicago and raised in England, where he attended Dulwich College. He returned to the United States, served briefly in World War I, and worked in the oil industry in Los Angeles before losing his job during the Depression. He began writing detective fiction for Black Mask magazine in 1933, at the age of forty-four.

Life and Career

Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), introduced Philip Marlowe — a private detective working in Los Angeles who is tough, honourable, lonely, and given to wry similes that have become the defining feature of the hard-boiled style. Chandler followed it with Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Little Sister (1949).

The Long Goodbye (1953) is his masterpiece — a long, complex, deeply melancholic novel about Marlowe’s friendship with a man named Terry Lennox. It is the novel in which Chandler transcended the detective genre entirely and wrote a major American novel about loneliness, loyalty, and the corruption of the American dream.

Chandler also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, contributing to the scripts of Double Indemnity (1944, with Billy Wilder) and Strangers on a Train (1951, for Alfred Hitchcock). His essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950) is the most important critical statement about detective fiction ever written.

Major Works and Themes

Chandler’s prose style is the most imitated in crime fiction — his similes (“She had a face like a Sunday school picnic”), his atmosphere, his wisecracking dialogue. But his real achievement is the creation of Marlowe as a moral figure: a man who moves through a corrupt world maintaining a personal code of honour that he can never articulate but never abandons.

His Los Angeles — the mansions of the Sternwoods, the hotels, the bars, the oil derricks, the Pacific — is one of the great literary landscapes.

Key Works

• The Big Sleep (1939)
• Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
• The Long Goodbye (1953)
• “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950, essay)

Collecting Chandler

The Big Sleep (1939, Alfred A. Knopf) — the debut — is extremely valuable: $5,000–$25,000+ in dust jacket.

Farewell, My Lovely (1940, Knopf) brings $2,000–$10,000. The Long Goodbye (1953, Hamish Hamilton, London) — the UK first preceded the American — brings $500–$3,000.

All Chandler novels were published by Knopf (US) and Hamish Hamilton (UK). The Knopf firsts are generally preferred by American collectors. Chandler died in 1959; signed copies are very scarce.