35 Facts About Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter.

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 Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature.

Raymond Chandler is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M Cain and other Black Mask writers.

Raymond Chandler was a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field.

Raymond Chandler must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Raymond Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.

Raymond Chandler was born in 1888 in Chicago, the son of Florence Dart and Maurice Benjamin Raymond Chandler.

Raymond Chandler spent his early years in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, living with his mother and father near his cousins and his aunt and uncle.

Raymond Chandler lived there with his mother, unmarried aunt, and maternal grandmother between 1901 and 1907.

Raymond Chandler 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.

Raymond Chandler spent some of his childhood summers in Waterford in Ireland with his mother's family.

Raymond Chandler did not go to university, instead spending time in Paris and Munich improving his foreign language skills.

Raymond Chandler then took an Admiralty job, lasting just over a year.

Raymond Chandler disliked the servility of the civil service and resigned, to the consternation of his family, became a reporter for the Daily Express and wrote for The Westminster Gazette.

Raymond Chandler was unsuccessful as a journalist, but he published reviews and continued writing romantic poetry.

Raymond Chandler found steady employment with the Los Angeles Creamery.

Raymond Chandler was twice hospitalized with Spanish flu during the pandemic and was undergoing flight training in the fledgling Royal Air Force when the war ended.

Cissy amicably divorced her husband, Julian, in 1920, but Raymond Chandler's mother disapproved of the relationship and refused to sanction the marriage.

In straitened financial circumstances during the Great Depression, Raymond Chandler turned to his latent writing talent to earn a living, teaching himself to write pulp fiction by analyzing and imitating a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner.

In 1950, Raymond Chandler described in a letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, why he began reading pulp magazines and later wrote for them:.

Raymond Chandler's only produced original screenplay was The Blue Dahlia.

Raymond Chandler had not written a denouement for the script and, according to producer John Houseman, Chandler concluded he could finish the script only if drunk, with the assistance of round-the-clock secretaries and drivers, which Houseman agreed to.

Raymond Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, an ironic murder story based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, which he thought implausible.

Raymond Chandler clashed with Hitchcock and they stopped talking after Hitchcock heard Raymond Chandler had referred to him as "that fat bastard".

Heartbroken and drunk, Raymond Chandler neglected to inter her cremated remains, and they sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.

Raymond Chandler regained his US citizenship in 1956, while retaining his British rights.

Raymond Chandler died at Scripps Memorial Hospital of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia in 1959.

Raymond Chandler is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, in San Diego, California.

Raymond Chandler was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.

Raymond Chandler described the struggle that writers of pulp fiction had in following the formula demanded by the editors of the pulp magazines:.

Raymond Chandler is a man who refuses a prospective client's fee for a job he considers unethical.

The high regard in which Raymond Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his lifetime.

In 2014, the Hollywood Walk of Fame selection committee announced that Raymond Chandler would be included the following year, but as of 2024, he has not been.

In 1991, Fulbright Program gave out a "Raymond Chandler Mystery Writing Award" and in 1994, they gave out a "Raymond Chandler Award".