Biography for
Raymond Chandler More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

23 July 1888, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Date of Death

26 March 1959, La Jolla, California, USA (pneumonia)

Birth Name

Raymond Thornton Chandler

Spouse

Pearl Cecily "Cissy" Hurlburt

(6 February 1924 - 12 December 1954) (her death)

Trivia

Was in his early 40s before selling his first magazine story.

Legendary detective novelist and occasional screenwriter. Created Philip Marlowe.

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.

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.

His final completed novel, "Playback" was originally written as a screenplay for Universal Studios. After paying him for it, Universal passed on shooting it, so Chandler converted it to a novel.

Like P.G. Wodehouse and Michael Ondaatje, he is one of the literary greats who were students at Dulwich College

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

Personal Quotes

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.

Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.

The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

Hollywood has all the personality of a paper cup.

[on attending the Academy Awards for the first (and last) time, 1941] If you can get past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of human intelligence, and if you can go out into the night and see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats, but not from the awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do these things and still feel the next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single, intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong because this sort of vulgarity, the very vulgarity from which the Oscars are made, is the inevitable price that Hollywood exacts from each of its serfs.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid . . . He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

The making of a motion picture is an endless contention of tawdry egos, almost none of them capable of anything more creative than credit stealing and self-promotion.

The Blue Dahlia (1946) wasn't a top-notch film by any means, largely because Veronica Lake couldn't play the love scenes and too much had to be discarded.

[on Ernest Hemingway] He never wrote but one story. All the rest is the same thing in different pants - or without different pants. And his eternal preoccupation with what goes on between the sheets becomes rather nauseating in the end. One reaches a time of life when limericks written on the walls of comfort stations are not just obscene, they are horribly dull. This man has only one subject and he makes that ridiculous.

I am the copyright owner. I can use my material in any way I see fit. There is no more or ethical issue involved.