Raymond Chandler

Attended Dulwich College as a "day boy" graduating in 1900.

An American novelist, writer of crime fiction featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond (Thornton) Chandler was born in Chicago of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. He moved to England when his parents divorced. He attended Dulwich College and studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907 and becoming a naturalized British subject.

He took a civil service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to America, settling in California. After the US entered World War I he enlisted in the Canadian Army, then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. After the armistice he returned to California and got a series of bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate. All along, however, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. He found a niche with stories of the "hard-boiled" school popularized by Dashiell Hammett, and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask, the same mystery magazine that had first published Hammett.

During World War I was a member of the Fiftieth Regiment of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. His basic training was in Victoria, British Columbia. On November 26, 1917 his regiment left Halifax, Nova Scotia setting sail for Liverpool. From Seaford, Sussex he left for the front on March 16, 1918. In late Summer 1918 he joined the Royal Air Force.

His first four novels--"The Big Sleep" (1939, filmed 1946 [The Big Sleep (1946)] and 1978 [The Big Sleep (1978)]); "Farewell My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944 [Murder, My Sweet (1944)] and 1975 [Farewell, My Lovely (1975)]); "The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947 [The Brasher Doubloon (1947)]); and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946 [Lady in the Lake (1946)])--which reworked plots from some of his short stories, were his most successful.

He appears in a brief cameo in Double Indemnity (1944). Late in the film he can be seen seated in a chair outside Edward G. Robinson's mezzanine office as Fred MacMurray leaves.

Encouraged Ian Fleming to continue writing his James Bond novels in the mid 1950s by writing a few words of recommendation to Fleming's American publishers.

Died midway through writing his last Philip Marlowe novel, "Poodle Springs," in 1959. More than three decades later, it was completed by Chandler admirer Robert B. Parker (author of the "Spenser" novels), and became a best-seller.

The house Chandler lived in on Shetland Ln. in Brentwood is shown in Hollywood Mouth 2 (2014). He wrote "The High Window" and "Lady in the Lake" while living here.