Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959) was an American detective-story writer who is primarily remembered for his hard-boiled novels about private eye Philip Marlowe. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and educated in England. After serving with the Canadian forces in World War I, he worked as an executive in various businesses in California while beginning to write short stories for the hard-boiled pulp magazines. Although many other writers of the 1920s and 1930s contributed to the private-eye genre of fiction, it is Chandler and Dashiell Hammett who are considered to be the outstanding practitioners of the form and whose influence is still evident in much of the mystery and thriller books published in the last six or seven decades.
Chandler wrote only seven novels. His most famous are probably his first, The Big Sleep, and his next-to-last, The Long Goodbye. Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart, is almost certainly the most famous of the numerous film adaptations of his works; Goodbye is probably considered to be his most mature and deepest work.