Biography Essay

Born in Chicago and educated in England, a failed poet and a successful businessman, Raymond Chandler did not publish his first fulllength fiction until he was fifty years old. Yet his seven novels were instrumental in the development of the American murder mystery from the straightforward crime puzzle to a stylistically complex narrative form. In the figure of Philip Marlowe, a "shop-soiled Galahad," Chandler developed the characteristics of the series detective. And, through Marlowe's observations of Los Angeles during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Chandler offers a sometimes bemused, frequently bitter, always penetrating portrait of Southern California that has helped shape popular myths about the region. Chandler's mixture of irony, stark realism, and scarred but dogged idealismexpressed in Marlowe's wise, and frequently wisecracking, voice—remains a model for writers.

Late in his life, Raymond Thornton Chandler said that if he ever wrote a nonfiction book...