Notes For July 23rd, 2026
This Day In Literary History
On July 23rd, 1888, the legendary American mystery writer Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois. When he was seven years old, Chandler's Irish mother moved the family to England after they were abandoned by his father, a civil engineer and drunkard.
In England, Chandler's uncle, an affluent lawyer, supported the family. Chandler received his education first at a local school in Upper Norwood, then at Dulwich College, London - the public college where P.G. Wodehouse and C.S. Forester learned to write.
After graduation, instead of attending university, Chandler traveled throughout Europe, spending time in Paris and Munich. He became a naturalized British citizen so he could take a civil examination, where he would receive the third highest grade ever earned.
Chandler then took an Admiralty job which lasted just over a year. He began his writing career as a poet, and published his first poem during this time. Chandler came to dislike the civil service.
Over his family's objections, he quit and became a reporter for the Daily Express and the Bristol Western Gazette newspapers. He was unsuccessful as a journalist, but did publish some reviews and continued writing poetry.
With a loan from his uncle, Chandler returned to the U.S. and settled in Los Angeles, where he earned a meager living doing menial jobs, including stringing tennis rackets and picking fruit.
Finally, he took a correspondence course in bookkeeping, which he completed ahead of schedule. It enabled him to find decent, steady employment. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Chandler enlisted in the CEF (Canadian Expeditionary Force).
In France, he fought in the trenches with the Gordon Highlanders, an infantry regiment in the British Army. By the end of the war, he was undergoing training to be a pilot for the RAF. After the war ended, Chandler returned to Los Angeles. He soon fell in love with Cissy Pascal, a married woman 18 years his senior.
Cissy ended her marriage in an amicable divorce, but Chandler's mother didn't approve of their relationship and would not allow them to marry. He had to support both women financially for the next four years. Chandler's mother died in September of 1923. Five months later, in February of 1924, he married Cissy.
By 1932, Raymond Chandler had become a highly paid vice president for the Dabney Oil syndicate. It would only last a year, as his battles with alcoholism and depression took their toll and resulted in his firing. But he got his life back together and decided to become a writer.
He taught himself how to write pulp fiction, and in 1933, his first short story, Blackmailers Don't Shoot, appeared in Black Mask magazine. For the next several years, he wrote and published stories regularly in pulp magazines.
In 1939, Raymond Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, was published. It became a huge success, and introduced the world to Chandler's most famous recurring character - a hard-boiled detective by the name of Philip Marlowe. He was quite different than most gumshoes.
Marlowe was intelligent (college educated) and complex, tough as nails yet sentimental at times, and somewhat fluent in Spanish. He had few friends and a passion for both classical music and the game of chess. If he suspected that a prospective client's job was unethical, he would refuse to take the case.
Chandler's writing style was hard-boiled, fast paced, and filled with clever and lyrical metaphors like The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. This distinctive style would be referred to as "Chandleresque."
In The Big Sleep, (the title is a euphemism for death) Philip Marlowe is hired by elderly, wheelchair-bound millionaire General Sternwood. The case seems simple enough: Marlowe must track down a blackmailer who claims that he's owed gambling debts accrued by Sternwood's unstable daughter, Carmen.
Marlowe soon realizes that nothing about the case is as it seems; people surrounding Carmen and the blackmailer start turning up dead, and Marlowe becomes ensnared in a grim and sordid web of murder, madness, and the illegal stag film business.
In 1946, The Big Sleep would be adapted as a feature film starring Humphrey Bogart. Though the novel had to be sanitized considerably for the screen as per Production Code requirements, the film is still considered one of the all time great movies, and rightfully so.
Before the film was made, Chandler's success as a novelist earned him a job as a Hollywood screenwriter. In 1944, he and legendary director Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay for Wilder's classic suspense thriller Double Indemnity - an adaptation of James M. Cain's novel.
In 1946, Chandler wrote an original screenplay for a noir thriller called The Blue Dahlia, which starred Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. In 1951, he co-wrote the screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock classic Strangers On A Train - an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel whose story Chandler found implausible.
Raymond Chandler continued to write more classic Philip Marlowe novels, including Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady In The Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1954), which won him an Edgar Award for Best Novel.
After he completed The Long Goodbye, Chandler's wife Cissy died following a long illness. Her death shattered him, and he plunged into a new battle with his old demons, drink and depression.
He attempted suicide in 1955. After he recovered in England, Chandler returned to California. He died three years later at the age of 70 from heart and kidney failure.
Quote Of The Day
"I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine."
- Raymond Chandler
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Raymond Chandler's classic first novel, The Big Sleep. Enjoy!
