23 July: Raymond Chandler

23 July is Private Eye Day, the birthday of Raymond Chandler, the creator of Philip Marlowe, who was born this day in 1888. 10 things you might not know about Raymond Chandler.

1. He was born in Chicago and both his parents were descended from Quakers. His mother was born in Waterford, Ireland, and he spent summers there, finally moving there with his mother when his father abandoned the family when Chandler was seven.

2. Soon after that, Chandler’s mother moved to England with him, in order to get him the best education. At that time he lived in Upper Norwood, London, and attended Dulwich College, where he would later work part time as a teacher. C.S. Forester, PG Wodehouse and Michael Ondaatje also attended that school.

3. His family’s ambition for him was the British civil service. He became a British citizen in 1907 and took a job in the Admiralty, but hated it and left after a year. His family were not well pleased.

4. After serving in the first world war, he met the step-mother of one of the men he’d enlisted with, Pearl Eugenie ("Cissy") Pascal. She was 18 years older than he was, but they nevertheless began an affair with Cissy divorcing her husband in 1920. She didn’t marry Chandler until 1923, however, as his mother disapproved and wouldn’t give her blessing. They only married when Chandler’s mother died. Cissy Chandler died in 1954 and Raymond fell apart. He drank to excess and never got around to dealing with her ashes, which sat for 57 years in a storage locker in the basement of Cypress View Mausoleum.

5. He used to write as a young man, but gave it up after the suicide of his friend Richard Middleton. Chandler was 22 at the time. Chandler figured if someone as good as his friend couldn’t hack it, it wasn’t the career for him, either. So he took a course in bookkeeping and worked for an oil company. He worked his way up to the giddy heights of vice president of the company, but by then, he was already drinking heavily, was often absent and when he was in work, got fresh with female colleagues. As a result of all that, he got fired.

6. This was the reason he took up writing again at the age of 45. He took a correspondence course in short story writing and started selling to pulp magazines. He didn’t publish his first book, The Big Sleep, until he was in his 50s.

7. As well as short stories and novels, he wrote screenplays for Hollywood. His first was The Blue Dahlia in 1946. Another was Strangers on a Train, which he co-wrote with with Czenzi Ormonde. However, he didn’t get on with Alfred Hitchcock at all. They frequently clashed over artistic differences and ended up not speaking at all. His final completed novel, Playback, started out as a screenplay for Universal Studios. They passed on shooting it, so Chandler turned it into a novel.

8. During prohibition, the writer played an active role in bootlegging, which contributed to his alcoholism.

9. He was, what they call in writing circles, a “pantser” rather than a “planner”, meaning he made the story up as he wrote rather than working to a plan. This meant he’d sometimes write himself into a corner and would have to throw the whole manuscript out and start again. “That’s the hell of being the kind of writer who cannot plan anything, but has to make it up as he goes along and then try to make sense out of it,” he said.

10. He died while working on a novel called Poodle Springs in 1959. Over 30 years later, it was finished by by Chandler fan Robert B. Parker.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

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