Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888–1959), the writer who turned Los Angeles into a film-noir landscape, was born in Chicago and migrated to England with his divorced mother at the age of seven. As a young student, he studied languages and was an avid reader of the classics. He later became a British citizen. During a brief stint as a journalist, from 1909-11, he wrote articles on European affairs, along with sketches, poems, and literary essays for various newspapers.

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a house in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun.”

– Philip Marlowe brooding in “Farewell, My Lovely”

Chandler returned to America in 1912. During the Atlantic crossing, he befriended a Los Angeles attorney, Edward Lloyd, and moved to L.A. after a brief stay in Nebraska . He studied bookkeeping and worked as an accountant for an L.A. creamery before enlisting in the Canadian army in 1917. He was sent to France and fought in the trenches, receiving a concussion during an artillery bombardment. After the war, he worked for a bank in San Francisco, then joined a Los Angeles oil company, where he remained for several years, first as bookkeeper, then as auditor, and finally as vice president. In 1932, he was fired for drunkenness and absenteeism.

At the age of 45, Chandler decided to try his hand as a writer for pulp crime magazines. His first detective story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933. Over the next three years he wrote 18 stories for the pulps. Often short of money, he and his wife Cissy moved from furnished apartment to furnished apartment throughout Southern California – sometimes two or three times a year. He later recalled: “I never slept in the park but I came damn close to it. I went five days without anything to eat but soup once.”

Chandler ’s first novel, The Big Sleep, set in Los Angeles and featuring the brooding, tough-talking private eye Philip Marlowe, was published in 1939. The book received good reviews and also sold well. Other Marlowe/L.A.-centered books followed: Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake , The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, and finally, Playback.

A collection of Chandler ’s early stories appeared in 1950 as The Simple Art of Murder. In an essay accompanying the collection, Chandler summed up his view of Marlowe: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.”

Several of his books were made into movies. Chandler also wrote screenplays, including an adaptation of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia, an original work for which he received an Academy Award nomination and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Deeply depressed by his wife’s death in 1954 and drinking heavily long before then, Chandler ’s health was often precarious. In 1956 he was hospitalized for exhaustion and malnutrition. A final novel, Poodle Springs, was begun but never completed. In 1959, after returning to his La Jolla home from New York where he accepted the presidency of the Mystery Writers of America, Chandler drank heavily and developed pneumonia. He died while hospitalized in Scripps Clinic and was buried in San Diego .

Chandler occupies a unique place in the cultural history of Los Angeles . Writing in the L.A. Times, David L. Ulin noted: “If, as is often said, every city has at least one writer it can claim for a muse, Raymond Chandler must be Los Angeles ’.” Chandler, said Ulin, is “the one Los Angeles writer whose books have as a consistent center the idea of the city as a living, breathing character – capturing the sights, the smells, the bleak glare of the sunlight, the deceptive smoothness of the surface beneath which nothing is as it seems.”

In 1994, the city of Los Angeles named a Hollywood street corner ” Raymond Chandler Square ” in the writer’s honor. The square is located at the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga boulevards, the site of Philip Marlowe’s fictitious 6th floor Hollywood office.

For further information, check out the Raymond Chandler Website.

– Contributed by Albert Greenstein, 1999