Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) was a leading exponent of the hard-boiled detective novel and, with Dashiell Hammett, a seminal figure in American crime fiction.

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888, of parents of Irish Quaker descent. His parents were divorced when he was very young, and in 1895 his mother took him to England where they lived with relatives in South London. There he attended Dulwich School from 1900 to 1905, and the following year he went to business school in Paris. In 1907, in order to qualify for a civil service job, he was naturalized as a British citizen. A few years later he free-lanced as a journalist for the Daily Express and showed his first creative inclination with some poetry and satire for the Westminster Gazette.

As an American living abroad, Chandler had grown up with an ethnic ambivalence and a curiosity about his native land that finally, in...