An encounter with the slightly older Richard Barham Middleton is said to have influenced him into postponing his career as writer. He was unsuccessful as a journalist, but he published reviews and continued writing romantic poetry. His first poem was published during that time.Ĭhandler disliked the servility of the civil service and resigned, to the consternation of his family, became a reporter for the Daily Express and also wrote for the Westminster Gazette. He then took an Admiralty job, lasting just over a year. In 1907, he was naturalized as a British subject in order to take the civil service examination, which he passed. He did not go to university, instead spending time in Paris and Munich improving his foreign language skills. He spent some of his childhood summers in Waterford with his mother's family. Chandler was classically educated at Dulwich College, London (a public school whose alumni include the authors P. Raymond was a first cousin to the actor Max Adrian, a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company Max's mother Mabel was a sister of Florence Thornton. While they lived with Chandler's maternal grandmother. Another uncle, a successful lawyer in Waterford, Ireland, reluctantly supported them To obtain the best possible education for Ray, his mother, originally from Ireland, moved them to the area of Upper Norwood in what is now the London Borough of Croydon, England in 1900. Chandler's father, an alcoholic civil engineer who worked for the railway, abandoned the family. He spent his early years in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, living with his mother and father near his cousins and his aunt (his mother's sister) and uncle. Four of his novels appear on the British-based Crime Writers Association Poll (1990) of the best 100 crime fiction novels ever published.Ī blue plaque marks the house in Cathedral Square where Chandler stayed in Waterford, Ireland.Ĭhandler was born in 1888 in Chicago, the son of Florence Dart (Thornton) and Maurice Benjamin Chandler.
The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.Īt least three of Chandler's novels have been regarded as masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". He is a founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Ĭhandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. His first short story, " Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression.
Raymond Thornton Chandler (J– March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter.
0 kommentar(er)
