'I need a book,' I continued by way of apology. I could tell right away I wasn't going to win any hosannas by being a smart-aleck. Such a looker I damn near tripped over a stack of calf-high hardbacks set next to a stand of morning papers. She was the first thing I saw when I walked into the bookstore. The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as 'arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'. Some of Chandler's novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). Chandler's Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, are considered by some to be synonymous with 'private detective,' both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction.

He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.Ĭhandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. All but Playback have been realized into motion pictures, some several times. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. His first short story, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot', was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler