Raymond Chandler: A Biography

Born in Nebraska of Irish parents, brought up in Chicago, educated at Dulwich College, and self-taught on those 'mean streets' of Los Angeles about which he wrote, Raymond Chandler - writer, accountant, civil servant, oil executive, poet, recluse, charmer, gentleman, drunk - was as full of contradictions as his origins. This is the first authorised biography in over twenty years of the cult novelist who was described by Evelyn Waugh in 1949 as 'the best writer in America' and who inspired 'film noir' and crime writing over the next half century. He did not write his first book till he was fifty, and his life is as unusual and engrossing as one of his stories. At twenty-five, he emigrated back to America; he fought in World War I with the Canadian forces, married a divorced exmodel, and became a wealthy oil executive in the boom-time Twenties, before re-inventing himself as a writer and legendary Hollywood screenwriter. Even his last years were eventful - after his'wife's death, he embarked on a manic globe-trotting spree, a series of reckless plane rides, chance encounters, crashed cars and proposals of marriage. With access to hundreds of unseen personal documents, photographs and previously unrecorded accounts by those who knew Chandler, Tom Hiney has unearthed revealing new material about the man and the writer. He vividly evokes those strange early years, brings alive the dangerous glamour of the Hollywood era, and puts Chandler's writing in the context of the organised crime and corruption in LA during Prohibition. He gives illuminating details of friendships with Alfred Hitchcock, Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, 'Lucky' Luciano, Stephen and Natasha Spender. Fully recorded for the first time is Chandler's most intimate friendship - with Cissy, the wife who was twenty years his senior - as well as his paradoxical relations with other women, his alcoholism, his wit, his loneliness, his suicide attempts, his extravagant generosity. In the light of new discoveries a much rawer, more complex, sympathetic and brilliant Chandler emerges - a man quite as extraordinary as the fiction he wrote.