Chandler invented Marlowe after losing an oil job
Raymond Chandler (23 July 1888 – 26 March 1959) was forty-four, fired from a Depression-era oil executive post, when he taught himself pulp detective fiction. His first story hit Black Mask in 1933; The Big Sleep (1939) introduced Philip Marlowe, the knight of mean streets who remade American crime prose.
Chicago-born, he moved with his Irish mother to Upper Norwood after his alcoholic father abandoned them, studying classics at Dulwich College beside future authors Wodehouse and Forester. Naturalized British in 1907 for a brief Admiralty civil-service job, he quit, failed as a Daily Express reporter, then borrowed passage money and reached Los Angeles by 1913. He enlisted in Canada’s CEF in 1917, fought in France, survived Spanish flu twice, and was in RAF flight training when the war ended. In 1924 he married Cissy Pascal, eighteen years older; by 1931 he was a highly paid Dabney Oil vice president—then dismissal a year later for drinking, absences, and office scandals.
Broke, he reverse-engineered Erle Stanley Gardner’s pulp craft, spending five months on an 18,000-word novelette sold for $180: “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.” Seven novels followed in his lifetime; all but Playback reached the screen. Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, and The Long Goodbye joined The Big Sleep on the Crime Writers’ Association’s top hundred. He co-wrote Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder and earned another Oscar nomination for The Blue Dahlia; Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train collaboration ended in mutual contempt, yet Chandler kept the lead credit.
With Hammett and Cain he founded hardboiled detection; Marlowe, like Spade, became shorthand for the private eye—Bogart playing both. In “The Simple Art of Murder” Chandler demanded a detective who is common yet uncommon, honorable without announcing it. Robert B. Parker later called Marlowe the culminating American hero for a Far West where the dream had run out of room. An unfinished Marlowe book became Poodle Springs under Parker’s hand in 1989.
Source: Raymond Chandler
