Raymond Chandler

American crime novelist and screenwriter whose Philip Marlowe novels — beginning with The Big Sleep — defined the hardboiled detective genre.

Raymond Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter who, alongside Dashiell Hammett, essentially invented the hardboiled detective novel as we know it. His private detective Philip Marlowe — who first appeared in The Big Sleep in 1939 — is one of the great characters of American fiction: a man of honor moving through a corrupt and sordid world, his integrity intact and his wit undiminished by the constant company of the vicious, the desperate, and the morally compromised.

Chandler came to fiction writing late, publishing his first story at forty-five after losing a lucrative career in the California oil industry to alcoholism. He had spent years reading pulp magazines before beginning to write for them, and his early short stories, collected and reworked in his novels, show an apprenticeship in which craft and style were carefully developed. By The Big Sleep, he had found his voice: a prose style of extraordinary precision and imagery that made Los Angeles shimmer on the page, in all its beauty and corruption.

Chandler wrote seven Marlowe novels — including Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, and The Long Goodbye, which many consider his masterpiece — before his death in 1959. He also wrote screenplays, most notably Double Indemnity (co-written with Billy Wilder) and Strangers on a Train for Alfred Hitchcock. His influence on crime fiction, cinema, and American prose style has been enormous: virtually every hardboiled detective story written since owes something to his example.