The World of Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler never wrote a memoir or autobiography. The closest he came to writing either was in—and around—his novels, shorts stories, and letters.

There have been books that describe and evaluate Chandler's life, but to find out what he himself felt about his life and work, Barry Day, editor of The Letters of Noël Coward, has cannily, deftly chosen from Chandler's writing, as well as the many interviews he gave over the years as he achieved cult status, to weave together an illuminating narrative that reveals the man, the work, the worlds he created.

Using Chandler's own words as well as Day's text, here is the life of "the man with no home," a man precariously balanced between his classical English education with its immutable values and that of a fast-evolving America during the years before the Great War, and the changing vernacular of the cultural psyche that resulted.

Chandler makes clear what it is to be a writer, and in particular what it is to be a writer of "hardboiled" fiction in what was for him "another language." Along the way, he discusses the work of his contemporaries: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham, and others.

Here is Chandler's Los Angeles, a city he adopted and that adopted him in the post-World War I period.

Here is his Hollywood. He recounts his own (rocky) experiences working in the town with Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and others.

We see Chandler's alter ego, Philip Marlowe, private eye, the incorruptible knight with little armor who walks the "mean streets" in a world not made for knights.

Here is Chandler on drinking (his life in the end was in a race with alcohol—and loneliness).

And here are Chandler's women—the Little Sisters, the "dames" in his fiction, and in his life. After her death Chandler led what he called a "posthumous life" writing fiction, but more often than not, his writing life was made up of letters written to women he barely knew.

Interwoven throughout the text are more than one hundred pictures that reveal the psyche and world of Raymond Chandler. In his own words, and with Barry Day's commentary, we see the shape this took and the way it informed the man and his extraordinary work.