Raymond Chandler was born July 23, 1888
Raymond Chandler, one of the great writers of detective stories, was born July 23, 1888 in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
His books created some of the most memorable characters to stroll across the silver screen.
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
Chandler’s description of his most famous creation private detective Philip Marlowe
Raymond Chandler
From San Marino’s 2009 series Writers
Designer: Anna Malpeli
This unsettling biography (A Mysterious Something In the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler) of the lonely, proud, secretive, alcoholic and often nasty man who crafted the most poetic hard-boiled detective fiction extant, could have been subtitled “How To Turn Pulp Fiction Into Art.” Like his iconic creation, Philip Marlowe, although more overtly in the author’s case, Raymond Chandler was messed up. Born in Chicago in 1888, the child of a violent alcoholic father and a doting mother, raised in a particularly class-obsessed British home, in love with a married woman 18 years his senior (who eventually became his wife), a man whose life and writings offer considerable grounds for considering him racist, misogynist, homophobic and suppressive of his own homosexuality—as well as equally plentiful evidence to deny every one of those charges—Chandler only fell into crime writing when the Great Depression and his own drinking financially ruined him in his 40s.
https://macleans.ca/culture/books/a-mysterious-something-in-the-light-the-life-of-raymond-chandler/
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