Raymond Chandler (1888–1959,) fully Raymond Thornton Chandler, was an American author of detective fiction. He is remembered as the creator of the private detective Philip Marlowe, who appeared in novels such as The Big Sleep (1939.)
Born in Chicago, Chandler was brought up in England from seven and educated at Dulwich College and in France and Germany. He worked as a freelance writer in London before going to California in 1912. He also served in the Canadian army in France and in the RAF during World War I.
After a variety of jobs, Chandler began to write during the Depression. His short stories and novelettes appeared in the magazine Black Mask and for the detective-story pulp magazines. He continued this writing experience into full-length ‘private eye’ novels: The Big Sleep (1939,) Farewell, My Lovely (1940,) The High Window (1942,) and The Lady in the Lake (1943,) all of which were successfully filmed.
Chandler went to Hollywood in 1943 to work on film scripts. He did much to establish the protocols of his genre, especially with his sardonic but honest anti-hero, Philip Marlowe, who also emerged in such later works as The Little Sister (1949,) The Long Goodbye (1953,) and Playback (1958.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Raymond Chandler
The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Justice, Lawyers
I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.
—Raymond Chandler
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
—Raymond Chandler
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Advertising
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Lawyers
So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Television
Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Business
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