Upon the publication of his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), Raymond Chandler was hailed as one of the leading practitioners of the American hard-boiled detective novel, but he received virtually no recognition as a writer of serious literature. During the course of his career his reputation slowly grew, first in England and then in the United States. He did not begin to receive academic attention until after his death, but today his books are studied in classrooms not only as premier examples of the detective novel but also as important works of twentieth-century American literature.

Few of Chandler's critics have connected his work with that of modernist writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, and Ezra Pound, perhaps because Chandler did not publish his first novel until 1939, long after the modernist movement had crested. He was, nevertheless, of the same generation as most of...