Raymond Chandler

Born Raymond Thornton Chandler on July 23, 1888, in Chicago, the only child of Maurice Chandler, a railway civil engineer and alcoholic who abandoned the family in the 1890s, and Florence Thornton, an Irishwoman who returned with her son to England in 1900 in search of a decent education, he was raised by his mother, an unmarried aunt, and a grandmother in Upper Norwood. He attended Dulwich College on a classical scholarship, took British nationality in 1907, and worked briefly as a civil servant at the Admiralty before turning to journalism in London. He returned to America in 1912, enlisted with the Canadian Gordon Highlanders in 1917, and survived shelling on the Western Front that left him the only man in his platoon still standing. After the war he settled in Los Angeles, married Cissy Pascal, eighteen years his senior, and rose to vice-president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate before drinking and an affair cost him his job in 1932. He was forty-four and broke. He spent five months teaching himself the form by retyping Erle Stanley Gardner stories, sold his first piece, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," to Black Mask in 1933, and gave hardboiled fiction its prose. The Big Sleep (1939), starring the wisecracking private detective Philip Marlowe, was followed by Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953). He wrote the screenplay for Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder, was twice nominated for an Academy Award, and produced the essay "The Simple Art of Murder" (1944). Cissy's death in 1954 broke him for good. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959, at seventy.

Grieving Cissy's death, Chandler loaded a .38 revolver in February 1955, walked into his bathroom, and fired twice at himself, missing both times, the bullets landing in the ceiling and the shower tile. Police arrived to find him attempting a third shot and had him briefly committed to a psychiatric ward.