Biographie de Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, in 1888, but moved to England with his mother when he was twelve. He went to school in London, and later worked as a newspaper reporter and book reviewer. In 1912 he returned to America, and went to live in California. After the First World War, during which he was in the Canadian army, he did a number of different jobs, and then worked for an oil company. He married in 1924.
Like his detective Philip Marlowe, Chandler had a problem with drinking, and he lost his job with the oil company because of it. He began writing detective stories, and his first story, Blackmailers don't Shoot, was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933. Over the next six years, Chandler continued to learn the craft of writing stories, always with a male detective. The character known as `Carmady' in Goldfish would one day become Chandler's most famous creation, Philip Marlowe.
In 1939 his first novel, The Big Sleep, appeared, and it was an immediate success. In his later novels, including Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953), Chandler frequently re-used parts of his earlier stories. He enjoyed great success from his writing, but after his wife's death in 1954 his health became poor, and he died in California in 1959.
Raymond Chandler is one of the great writers of crime fiction. He described the detective-hero like this: 'He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man ... He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.'
