Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler came to detective writing late, at forty-four, after the Depression cost him his oil executive job in 1932. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", appeared in Black Mask in 1933; The Big Sleep followed in 1939. He published seven novels in his lifetime, nearly all adapted to film, some more than once. Alongside Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, he founded the hardboiled school, but his stylistic influence ran deeper - a blend of toughness and unexpected poetry that reshaped American popular literature. The Big Sleep placed second on the Crime Writers' Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, and The Long Goodbye also made the list. The Long Goodbye was later praised 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." He was a perceptive critic, too: his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" remains the canonical statement on detective fiction, defining the detective as "a man of honor - by instinct, by inevitability, without t