Birthday: "If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come... When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split."

“Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
“That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said.
-Farewell My Lovely (1940)

Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959)

Author and screenwriter

President, Mystery Writers of America (1958-59)

Born in Chicago, Raymond Chandler grew up in the British Isles. After his father- a drunk- left them, his mother took him back to Ireland, where her well-to-do relatives took them in and saw to Chandler’s prep school education.

He figured on staying there, and became a naturalized Brit in 1907; passing the civil service exam, he worked at the Admiralty for a year. Then, bored, he quit and went into journalism. After a few years of at best middling success, he borrowed money from an uncle- who charged him interest- to return to America. He settled briefly in San Francisco, then- after his mother joined him- in Los Angeles.

After some aimless, poverty-stricken years picking fruit, stringing tennis rackets, whatever paid the rent, he got a steady job in an LA creamery. He enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Army in 1917 and was completing training as a pilot when the war ended.

He returned to LA, got on with an oil company, and started an affair with a military mate’s mother, eighteen years his senior. His mother disapproved; it was not until her death in 1923 that he was free to marry Cissy Pascal.

By 1931 Chandler was a well-paid vice president at Dabney Oil, but the rest of his life as shambolic. He drank too much, missed work, chased women at work when he was there, and experienced depressions so deep he threatened suicide. The company fired him in 1932.

Out of work in the depths of the Depression, Chandler studied Erle Stanley Gardner’s pulp fiction stories and decided to become  a writer. His first story was published in 1933. His first novel, The Big Sleep, came out in 1939.

Chandler was an overnight sensation, if not universally so; his style was easy for parodists, and his genre- detective stories- was dissed by the highbrows. But his critical reputation has endured and grown as the hardboiled style of his work was translated into the classics of film noir.

Farewell My Lovely was published in 1940, and Chander’s hard-bitten style attracted notice in Hollywood. He collaborated with Billy Wilder on the 1944 screenplay, Double Indemnity; with Hitchcock- bitterly- on Strangers on a Train, and- with himself- on The Blue Dahlia. He collected two Oscar nominations during his fifteen year arc of success.

His wife died in 1954, plunging Chandler into drinking and depression again. He tried to kill himself, then embarked on ludicrous romantic pursuits of his agent, his secretary, Orwell’s widow, and Stephen Spender's wife (the last two thought him a repressed homosexual).

Drunk more often than not (leaving The Blue Dahlia screenplay unfinished, he agreed to write the ending only if director John Houseman supplied him enough booze the stay drunk until he was finished), Chandler forgot to have his wife’s ashes interred. Leaving no burial instructions for himself, Chandler was buried in another memorial park while her remains were stored in the original one. It was not until 2011 that they were both, finally, buried together. “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts,” reads the tombstone.

Related Sites:

The Raymond Chandler Website

Joyce Carol Oates, “The Visionary Detective,” The New York Review of Books, June 20, 2013

Facebook, “The World of Raymond Chandler in His Own Words”