Raymond Chandler
Subtitle: a biography
By: Tom Hiney.
Edition: 1st American ed.
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 310
Subjects: Chandler, Raymond, 1888-1959.; Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.; Detective and mystery stories -- Authorship.
Description: Described by Evelyn Waugh in the late 1940s as "the greatest living American novelist," Raymond Chandler won the admiration of millions of fans, in addition to the more astute praise of writers such as T.S. Eliot and Edmund Wilson for his Philip Marlowe detective novels. He was central to the birth of what became known as film noir - for both the movies he wrote in Hollywood and those that were made from his books - and has been credited as the inspiration for the classic film, Chinatown.

For this major new biography, Tom Hiney has had access to unseen personal papers, as well as previously unrecorded accounts of those who knew Chandler throughout his life. In the first biography in over twenty years, Hiney takes an uncensored look at Chandler's life as an author, a husband, a screenwriter, and occasional rogue.

Vividly, Hiney evokes the strange early years before Chandler was a writer, brings alive the dangerous glamour of the Hollywood era in which he flourished, and puts his screenwriting in the context of the organized crime and corruption of Los Angeles during Prohibition.

He gives illuminating details of Chandler's alcohol addiction - which plagued him off and on throughout his life - his friendships with Howard Hawks, "Lucky" Luciano, and Alfred Hitchcock, and fully records for the first time Chandler's most intimate friendship - with Cissy, his wife of thirty years, seventeen years his senior.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 288-304) and index.