An American novelist, writer of crime fiction featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond (Thornton) Chandler was born in Chicago of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. He moved to England when his parents divorced. He attended Dulwich College and studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907 and becoming a naturalized British subject. He took a civil service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to America, settling in California. After the US entered World War I he enlisted in the Canadian Army, then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. After the armistice he returned to California and got a series of bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate.
All along, however, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. He found a niche with stories of the "hard-boiled" school popularized by Dashiell Hammett, and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask, the same mystery magazine that had first published Hammett. His first four novels--"The Big Sleep" (1939, filmed 1946 [Le grand sommeil (1946)] and 1978 [Le grand sommeil (1978)]); "Farewell My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944 [Adieu, ma belle (1944)] and 1975 [Adieu ma jolie (1975)]); "The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947 [La pièce maudite (1947)]); and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946 [La dame du lac (1947)])--which reworked plots from some of his short stories, were his most successful.
He spent some time in Hollywood as a screenwriter, contributing to Billy Wilder's Assurance sur la mort (1944), the film noir classic Le dahlia bleu (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's L'inconnu du Nord-Express (1951). He wrote realistically, in stark contrast to the English style of drawing-room puzzle mysteries where an amateur detective always knows more than the police and clues turn up at just the right moment. Chandler dismissed these plots as "having God sit in your lap."
