Raymond Chandler

Chandler was forty-four and unemployed when he started writing fiction. He had been an executive at a California oil syndicate and lost the job over drinking, absenteeism and an affair, then taught himself the pulp form by taking apart stories in Black Mask magazine. The Big Sleep appeared in 1939 and introduced Philip Marlowe, a private detective who is broke, rude to the rich and unwilling to be bought. His sentences did far more for the genre than his plots, which he barely cared about; asked during the filming of that novel who had killed one of the characters, he admitted he did not know. Raised partly in England and educated at Dulwich College, he kept a formal prose rhythm oddly wedded to Los Angeles slang. He married Cissy Pascal, eighteen years older, and drank heavily after her death in 1954, never really recovering. He died in 1959.