Raymond Chandler was born on July 23, 1888. Chandler was one of the innovators who created the American hard-boiled detective story; his detective, Philip Marlowe, starred in Chandler's seven novels and several short stories.

Chandler was born in Chicago, but spent most of his childhood in London, where he was raised by his mother and her family after his father had abandoned them. Chandler was naturalized as a British subject in 1907, and worked briefly as a civil servant and as a reporter. He did his first writing during these years, mostly poems and essays which he would later dismiss as not particularly worthwhile.

In 1912, Chandler returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles. He gave up writing and trained to be an accountant, a career he pursued with much success for many years. Chandler's mother died in 1923. The next year, he married Cissy Pascal. Chandler and Pascal had been romantically involved for several years, but his mother had disapproved of the relationship, because Pascal was divorced and almost 20 years older than Chandler.

In 1932, Chandler lost his job at the oil company where he'd worked for the last decade. His work habits had become increasingly erratic, and in the early years of the Great Depression, he found it difficult to find a new job. In order to support himself, he returned to writing. He spent several months studying the detective stories that were being published in the pulp magazines—Chandler was particularly fond of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason stories—and began writing stories of his own.

From the beginning, Chandler struggled against the restrictive formula of the pulps, wanting to write more creative and literary stories than that formula generally allowed. He would later say, "To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack."

Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), was published in 1939, and it introduced Philip Marlowe. Marlowe and other early hardboiled detectives have become so familiar to us that a description of the character today can sound like a collection of cliches—heavy smoker and drinker, cynical about a world in which the legal system is just as corrupt as the criminals, fond of women but eternally a bachelor—but the character was still new and innovative when Chandler created it.

Chandler had been slowly creating Marlowe during the 1930s, in his short stories. He wasn't always named Philip Marlowe at first; several stories which were originally published with a different name for the main character were converted to Marlowe stories when they were gathered to be published in book form after the character became popular. Over the next fifteen years, Chandler wrote five more novels about Marlowe; they are considered among the finest detective novels ever written, and include such masterpieces as Farewell, My Lovely (e-book | e-audio | print | audio) and The Long Goodbye (e-book | e-audio | print | audio).

During these years, Chandler also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, receiving Academy Award nominations for his screenplays for Double Indemnity, written with Billy Wilder, based on James M. Cain's novel, and The Blue Dahlia, an original screenplay.

In 1954, Chandler's wife died, and he took her death very badly, sinking into alcohol and depression. Chandler was so inattentive to the world around him that he never got around to having Cissy's cremated remains buried; it was not until 2011 that they were finally removed from a storage closet and buried next to Chandler in a San Diego cemetery. After Cissy's death, Chandler wrote very little. One final novel, Playback (e-book | e-audio | print), was published in 1958, and that was based on an unproduced screenplay that he'd written a decade earlier. It is generally considered to be his weakest novel, and it is probably no coincidence that it is the only one never to have been adapted by the movies.

The movies have been kind to Chandler, and Philip Marlowe has been played by Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, and Elliott Gould, among others. Gerald Mohr played the role in a late 1940s radio series, and Toby Stephens starred in 2011 BBC radio adaptations of the Marlowe novels.

Chandler died in 1959. Four chapters of an incomplete novel were discovered in his estate; Poodle Springs (e-audio | print) was completed by Robert B. Parker and published in 1989. Chandler never wrote an autobiography or memoir, but Barry Day has edited passages from his novels, short stories, and letters into The World of Raymond Chandler (e-book | print), which is the closest we will get. Tom Williams' A Mysterious Something in the Light (e-book | print) is a comprehensive biography, and Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace (e-book | print) focuses specifically on Chandler's relationship with Cissy Pascal Chandler. Several of today's finest writers of hard-boiled fiction offer their own takes on Marlowe in the anthology Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe (e-book | print).

Also This Week

July 26, 1775

The United States Post Office was created by the Continental Congress, making it one of the few government agencies that is older than the United States itself. Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General; he held the job for about fifteen months. From 1829 to 1971, the Post Office was a Cabinet-level department, and the Postmaster General a member of the president's cabinet. In 1971, the Post Office was transformed into the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency. Winifred Gallagher looks at the history of American postal service in How the Post Office Created America (e-book | e-audio | print).

July 22, 1898

Alexander Calder was born. Calder was an American artist who worked in a variety of forms, but is best known as a sculptor. In the 1930s, he began to create hanging sculptures made up of carefully balanced shapes that would move with the wind—mobiles. In the last 20 years of his career, he focused more of his attention on very large sculptures, many of them built for prominent public spaces. The American Masters documentary series includes a film on Calder's life and work, which is available for streaming and on DVD.

July 25, 1965

Bob Dylan's performance with an electric band stirred controversy at the Newport Folk Festival. There had been some electric music on his recent album Bringing It All Back Home, and not everyone in the folk music world appreciated it. Only a few days before the Newport performance, "Like a Rolling Stone," the first single from Highway 61 Revisited, had been released. Even at the time, there was disagreement about why parts of the audience were booing Dylan's performance. Some said that it was because of the electric performance; others argued that it was the poor sound quality or the short set, he played only three songs.

July 23 is National Hot Dog Day and July 28 is Hamburger Day

With that combination, what better time to throw some dogs and burgers on the grill? If catsup and mustard aren't quite exciting enough anymore, perhaps you're ready for the variations to be found in Russell van Kraayenberg's Haute Dogs (e-book | print) or James McNair & Jeffrey Starr's Burger Parties (e-book | print).