Raymond Thornton Chandler, an American novelist, was born in Chicago to an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. After his parents' divorce, he moved to England, where he attended Dulwich College and studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907 and becoming a naturalized British.
subjectHe took a civil service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to America, settling in California. After the United States 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 held a series of bookkeeping jobs, eventually becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate.
Throughout his career, Chandler had been submitting stories, poems, sketches, and essays to various periodicals. When the Depression hit and the oil business declined, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. He found success with his stories of the "hard-boiled" school, popularized by Dashiell Hammett, and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask magazine.
Chandler's first four novels - "The Big Sleep", "Farewell My Lovely", "The High Window", and "The Lady in the Lake" - were his most successful, reworking plots from some of his short stories. He spent time in Hollywood as a screenwriter, contributing to films such as "Double Indemnity", "The Blue Dahlia", and "Strangers on a Train".
Chandler's writing style was marked by its realism, in stark contrast to the English style of drawing-room puzzle mysteries. He dismissed these plots as "having God sit in your lap", and instead focused on creating complex, gritty stories that explored the darker side of human nature.
