Raymond Chandler
Overview
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...

.

In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction
Detective fiction
Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...

 writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine
Pulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...

. His first novel, The Big Sleep
The Big Sleep
The Big Sleep is a hardboiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler, the first in his acclaimed series about detective Philip Marlowe. The work has been adapted twice into film, once in 1946 and again in 1978...

, was published in 1939.
Quotations

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

"Red Wind" (short story, 1938), published in Trouble Is My Business (1939)

He snorted and hit me in the solar plexus.I bent over and took hold of the room with both hands and spun it. When I had it nicely spinning I gave it a full swing and hit myself on the back of the head with the floor.

"Pearls are a Nuisance" (short story, 1939)

The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.

"Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel" (essay, 1949), first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.

letter, 22 April 1949, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.

letter, 19 April 1951, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

"Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story", published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler(1976)

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

"A Qualified Farewell" (essay, early 1950's), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

 
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