A Mysterious Something in the Light by Tom Williams

Four of his novels appear on the British-based Crime Writers Association Poll (1990) of the best 100 crime fiction novels ever published.Ī blue plaque marks the house in Cathedral Square where Chandler stayed in Waterford, Ireland.Ĭhandler was born in 1888 in Chicago, the son of Florence Dart (Thornton) and Maurice Benjamin Chandler. The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as 'arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'. Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.Īt least three of Chandler's novels have been regarded as masterpieces, including Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953).

The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with 'private detective'. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Ĭhandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. His first short story, ' Blackmailers Don't Shoot', was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. Raymond Thornton Chandler (J– March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter.

A Mysterious Something in the Light by Tom Williams