Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
The Big Sleep (1939) is a hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first to feature the detective Philip Marlowe. It has been adapted for film twice, in 1946 and again in 1978. The story is set in Los Angeles.
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas".
The Long Goodbye is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1953, his sixth novel featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. Some critics consider it inferior to The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but others rank it as the best of his work. Chandler, in a letter to a friend, called the novel "my best book".
Hans Wollschläger was a German writer, translator, historian, and editor of German literature.
Lady in the Lake is a 1947 American film noir that marked the directorial debut of Robert Montgomery, who also stars in the film. The picture also features Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Tom Tully, Leon Ames and Jayne Meadows. The murder mystery was an adaptation of the 1943 Raymond Chandler novel The Lady in the Lake. The film was Montgomery's last for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), after eighteen years with the studio.
The Simple Art of Murder is a critical essay by hard-boiled detective fiction author Raymond Chandler. The first version of the essay was published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944 and a revised version was included in Howard Haycraft's anthology The Art of the Mystery Story. These versions, which are a history of Chandler's writings, has little to do with the third version, which appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, April 15, 1950, and, somewhat rewritten, served to introduce the eponymous short story collection The Simple Art of Murder, 1950, which contained the eight of Chandler's stories pre-dating his first novel, The Big Sleep, which he wanted remembered.
Richard Barham Middleton was an English poet and author, who is remembered mostly for his short ghost stories, in particular "The Ghost Ship".
The Lady in the Lake is a 1943 detective novel by Raymond Chandler featuring the Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe. Notable for its removal of Marlowe from his usual Los Angeles environs for much of the book, the novel's complicated plot initially deals with the case of a missing woman in a small mountain town some 80 miles (130 km) from the city. The book was written shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and makes several references to America's recent involvement in World War II.
Playback is a novel by Raymond Chandler featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe. It was first published in Britain in July 1958; the US edition followed in October that year. Chandler died the following year; Playback is his last completed novel.
The Big Sleep is a 1946 film noir directed by Howard Hawks, the first film version of the 1939 novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler. The film stars Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge in a story about the "process of a criminal investigation, not its results". William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman co-wrote the screenplay. In 1997, the U.S. Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," and added it to the National Film Registry.
The Little Sister is a 1949 novel by Raymond Chandler, his fifth featuring the private investigator Philip Marlowe. The story is set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. The novel centres on the younger sister of a Hollywood starlet and has several scenes involving the film industry. It was partly inspired by Chandler's experience working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and his low opinion of the industry and most of the people in it. The book was first published in the UK in June 1949 and was released in the United States three months later.
The Long Goodbye is a 1973 American neo-noir thriller film directed by Robert Altman and based on Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel. The screenplay was written by Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote the screenplay for Chandler's The Big Sleep in 1946. The film stars Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe and features Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt, Jim Bouton, Mark Rydell and an early uncredited appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Poodle Springs is the eighth Philip Marlowe novel. It was started in 1958 by Raymond Chandler, who left it unfinished at his death in 1959. The four chapters he had completed, which bore the working title The Poodle Springs Story, were subsequently published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962), a collection of excerpts from letters and unpublished writings. In 1988, on the occasion of the centenary of Chandler's birth, the crime writer Robert B. Parker was asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to complete the novel.
Marlowe is a 1969 American neo-noir film starring James Garner as Raymond Chandler's private detective Philip Marlowe. Directed by Paul Bogart, the film was written by Stirling Silliphant based on Chandler's 1949 novel The Little Sister.
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived in the US until he was seven, when his parents separated and his Anglo-Irish mother brought him to live near London; he was educated at Dulwich College from 1900. After working briefly for the British Civil Service, he became a part-time teacher at Dulwich, supplementing his income as a journalist and writer—mostly for The Westminster Gazette and The Academy. His output—consisting largely of poems and essays—was not to his taste, and the critic Paul Bishop considers the work as "lifeless", while Contemporary Authors describes it as "lofty in subject and mawkish in tone". Chandler returned to the US in 1912 where he trained to become an accountant in Los Angeles. In 1917 he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, saw combat in the trenches in France where he was wounded, and was undergoing flight training in the fledgling Royal Air Force when the war ended.
Perchance to Dream is a detective crime novel by Robert B. Parker, written as an authorized sequel to The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Following his post-mortem collaboration with Chandler on Poodle Springs, this 1991 release is the second and final Philip Marlowe novel written by Parker.
Poodle Springs is a 1998 neo-noir HBO film directed by Bob Rafelson, starring James Caan as private detective Philip Marlowe.
William Horberg is an American film producer, chair of the Producers Guild of America on the East coast, and guest curator at ArtYard. His films include Anthony Minghella's adaptations of the novels The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain. He also produced the Fallen Angels series for Showtime from 1993-1995.
Kathrine Sorley Walker was a British writer, editor and critic with a particular focus on ballet. The author of many books on dance, she reviewed dance performances in a variety of outlets including Dancing Times and Dance International, as well as being the ballet critic for the Daily Telegraph for 24 years.
