SEM-VI, DSE-4

Unit-3, The Big Sleep

By Raymond Chandler
Short Biography of Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. Chandler was born Born In
Chicago, Illinois, The United States on July 23, 1888 to 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. From 1896 to 1912 Chandler lived in England with his mother.
Although he was an American citizen and a resident of California when World War-I began in
1914, he served in the Canadian army and then in the Royal Flying Corps (afterward the Royal Air
Force). After the armistice (settlement) he returned to California and got a series of bookkeeping jobs,
finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate.
Having returned to California in 1919, he prospered as a petroleum company executive until
the Great Depression of the 1930s, when he turned to writing detective fiction for a living after losing his
job as an oil company executive.
After the war ended he came back to Los Angeles when a love affair sparked between him and
Cissy Pascal. She was 18 years older than him and was a mother of a fellow army man who was enlisted
with Chandler. His mother was strictly against this relationship, so even though Cissy divorced her
husband to marry Chandler but he could not marry her because of his mother’s strong disapproval. In
1923 Chandler’s mother died and he married Cissy on 6th February 1924.
Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. Some of Chandler's
novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces:
Farewell, My Lovely (1940),
The Little Sister (1949), and
The Long Goodbye (1953).
His first published short story "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", appeared in the “pulp” magazine Black
Mask in 1933.

From 1943 he was a Hollywood screenwriter. Among his best-known scripts were for the
films Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951).

Chandler completed seven novels, all with Philip Marlowe as hero:

1. The Big Sleep (1939),

2. Farewell, My Lovely (1940),
3. The High Window (1942),
4. The Lady in the Lake (1943),
 5. The Little Sister (1949),
6. The Long Goodbye (1953), and
7. Playback (1958).
Among his numerous short-story collections are
Five Murderers (1944) and
The Midnight Raymond Chandler (1971).
The most popular film versions of Chandler’s work were
Murder, My Sweet (1944); also distributed as (Farewell, My Lovely), starring Dick Powell, and
The Big Sleep (1946), starring Humphrey Bogart, both film noir classics.
His wife Cissy died in 1954 leaving him severely heartbroken. He entered clinical depression and
started drinking excessively. He also attempted suicide which failed. Chandler died on 26th March 1959.

He left behind an unfinished novel which was later completed and published by Robert B. Parker.
Before his death he was also elected as the president of “Mystery writers of America.”