Raymond Chandler
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For other persons named Raymond Chandler, see Raymond Chandler (disambiguation).
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was an author of crime stories and novels of immense stylistic influence upon modern crime fiction, especially in the style of the writing and the attitudes now characteristic of the genre. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, is synonymous with "private detective", along with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.
Early lifeRaymond Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but moved to Britain in 1895 with his Irish-born mother after they were abandoned by his father, an alcoholic civil engineer for an American railway company. His uncle, a successful lawyer, supported them.[1] In 1900, Chandler attended Dulwich College, London,[1] where he was classically educated. He did not attend university, instead spending time in France and Germany. 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. He then 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 he said that "It was the age of the clever young man, but I was distinctly not a clever young man."[2] 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.[1] After the armistice, he returned to Los Angeles with his mother, and soon began a love affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior.[1] Chandler's mother, who had opposed the union, died on 26 September 1923, and not long after, in 1924, Chandler and Pascal married.[3][1] 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 a threatened suicide[1] provoked his firing. Pulp writerTo 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 work as a Hollywood screenwriter: he and Billy Wilder co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944), based upon on James M. Cain's novel of the same name. 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 - based on Patricia Highsmith's novel. By then, the Chandlers had moved to La Jolla, California, a rich coastal town near San Diego. Later life and deathIn 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 quitting it for long, and the quality and quantity of the writing suffered.[1] In 1955, he attempted suicide; literary scholars documented that suicide attempt. In The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, 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 life was both helped and complicated by the women to whom he was attracted — notably Helga Greene (his literary agent); Jean Fracasse (his secretary); Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's widow); and Natasha Spender (Stephen Spender's wife), the latter two of whom assumed Chandler to be a repressed homosexual.[4] Note that Judith Freeman's book perpetuates errors dating back to the MacShane biography relating to the death of Florence Chandler and a number of residences.[5] After time in England he returned to La Jolla, where he died 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. Critical receptionCritics and writers, ranging from W.H. Auden to Evelyn Waugh to Ian Fleming greatly admired the finely wrought prose of Raymond Chandler.[1] 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. The high critical regard in which Chandler is usually held today makes poignant the critical pans that stung Chandler in his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Mrs. Blanche Knopf, published in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, Chandler complained: "The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time[citation needed]." 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.[1] 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 his novels have been cinematically adapted, notably The Big Sleep (1946), by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as Philip 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. Novels
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