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 boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Murder
The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Hollywood
She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Smiles, Smile
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Authors & Writing
Television’s perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don’t have to concentrate. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to remember. You don’t miss your brain because you don’t need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man’s nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn’t got the price of a television set.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Television
The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Business
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside of an advertising agency.
—Raymond Chandler
The overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the constant drinking, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Hollywood
The tragedy of life is not that the beautiful things die young; it is that they grow old and mean.
—Raymond Chandler
Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Alcohol, Alcoholism
Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Manners
The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
—Raymond Chandler
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Poets, Poetry
It’s fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Education, America
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Books, Literature
A good title is the title of a successful book.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Reading, Books
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?. In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill?. You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Dying, Death
Your rat tail is all the fashion now. I prefer a bushy plume, carried straight up. You are Siamese and your ancestors lived in trees. Mine lived in palaces. It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Animals, Cats
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Criticism, Critics
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid… He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Heroism, Heroes
Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
They don’t want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can’t use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Hollywood
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Reading, Books
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
A really good detective never gets married.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Police, Control
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 moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Talent, Fresh
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Style
The kind of lawyer you hope the other fellow has.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Law, Lawyers
There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
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
Topics: Hollywood
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, Law
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Science, Scientists
Its idea of “production value” is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away. Its vision of the rewarding movie is a vehicle for some glamour-puss with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume, or for some male idol of the muddled millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, the build of a lifeguard, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Hollywood
I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you. If your allergies hate them, I will tolerate the situation to the best of my ability.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Animals, Cats
The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism. All this stuff you read about men yelling and screaming, beating against the bars, running spoons along them, guards rushing in with clubs—all that is for the big house. A good jail is one of the quietest places in the world. Life in jail is in suspension.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Prison
Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Business
It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Language
The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called “significant literature” will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.
—Raymond Chandler
Topics: Public
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Ellery Queen American Crime Fiction Authors
Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
Dashiell Hammett American Crime Writer
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Truman Capote American Novelist
George R. R. Martin American Writer
John Irving American Novelist
William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
William Goldman Hollywood Screenwriter