Big Sleep/Farewell, My Lovely/the High Window Farewell, My Lovely ; The High Window

Raymond Chandler is often called the greatest of the American hard-boiled detective-story writers. His only rival would be his acquaintance Dashiell Hammett, six years his junior but finished with writing by the time Chandler, at the age of fifty, was beginning. Chandler was by heritage and education British, though he was born in Chicago in 1888, and his father was an American, a hard-drinking engineer for the railroads, whom he never saw again after his parents divorced. Without money, his Anglo-Irish Quaker mother decided to take the seven-year-old Raymond back to her home in Ireland, and then to London, where they were supported by an uncle who saw to it that he got a good English education in 'public', that is, private schools, most importantly Dulwich College, which also produced such other notable writers as C. S. Forester and P. G. Wodehouse. Here he became truly British, read the classics and played rugby like other English schoolboys. Though he showed an aptitude for writing, he expected to go into the law. This was not to be. When Raymond was sixteen, the generous uncle thought he had supported his sister Florence and her son long enough. Raymond was obliged to leave Dulwich College, and so was thrust rather abruptly into a harsh real world for which he had little practical training, with the obligation to support his mother. First of all, however, he toured the Continent, like many young Englishmen before him, spending some time in Paris and in Germany to complete his education. He then returned to England to take a civil service examination, where he came in third of 800 candidates, and was given a job in the Admiralty. This did not last, nor did a term of teaching at his old school. The restless young man moved to Bloomsbury, then the heart of literary London, wrote book reviews, and tried living by his pen, not without success; but a boy of no private means needed a serious job. When he was twenty-four, he decided to put his unpromising literary career behind him and embarked for America to make his fortune, trying a variety of jobs in a variety of places from the midwest to California, learning bookkeeping and stringing tennis rackets among others. As his biographer Tom Hiney says, 'There is no doubt that the character of Philip Marlowe was fleshed out in these resolute, if friendless and moneyless months in Californian boarding houses.' But it would be some years before Chandler's great detective character Philip Marlowe saw the light of day. Chandler decided to settle permanently in Los Angeles, where he had landed a good job, and his mother came back to America to keep house for him. Unlike Dashiell Hammett, a Pinkerton detective, the more sheltered Chandler, with no real experience of crime and detection, worked as a business executive, and lived with his mother until he was over thirty-five. The First World War was to change many things. Chandler joined the Canadian army, saying later that it felt more natural for him to wear a British uniform, and saw some action in Europe; it was in the trenches that he learned the details of blood and death that Marlowe would need to know. He was discharged in 1919 and, back in Los Angeles, planned to marry the love of his life, Cissy Pascal, a beautiful, twice-married woman seventeen years older than he, who pretended to be ten years younger than she was, and looked his own age. His mother, dying of cancer, opposed this peculiar marriage, so for a time Chandler, working as an executive in an oil company, supported both women in separate establishments. He and Cissy were married in 1924, after Florence's death, and they would be married, happily, it appeared, until she died more than thirty years later, when she was eighty-four and Chandler sixty-six. He would live only another four chaotic, troubled years. By the end of the 1920s, a life-long problem, alcoholism, interrupted hisChandler, Raymond is the author of 'Big Sleep/Farewell, My Lovely/the High Window Farewell, My Lovely ; The High Window' with ISBN 9780375415012 and ISBN 0375415017.