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Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was a British/American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in ''Black Mask,'' a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, ''The Big Sleep'', was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but ''Playback'' have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.〔Chandler, Raymond (1950). ''Trouble is My Business'', Vintage Books, a division of Random House, 1988, "About the Author"〕 Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other ''Black Mask'' writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: ''Farewell, My Lovely'' (1940), ''The Little Sister'' (1949), and ''The Long Goodbye'' (1953). ''The Long Goodbye'' is praised within 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".〔Pronzini, 169〕 ==Early life== Chandler was born in 1888 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Florence Dart (Thornton) and Maurice Benjamin Chandler.〔http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/biographies/85557537/raymond-thornton-chandler〕〔http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=62446992〕 He spent his early years in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, living with his mother and father near his cousins, aunt (mother's sister) and uncle.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title= Chapter One Raymond Chandler )〕 After Chandler's family was abandoned by his father, an alcoholic civil engineer who worked for the railway, and to obtain the best possible education for Ray, his mother, originally from Ireland, moved them to the area of Upper Norwood in the London Borough of Croydon, England in 1900.〔.〕 Another uncle, a successful lawyer in Waterford, Ireland, supported them while they lived with his maternal grandmother. Chandler was classically educated at Dulwich College, London (a public school whose alumni include the authors P. G. Wodehouse〔 and C. S. Forester). He spent some of his childhood summers in Waterford with his maternal family. He did not go to university, instead spending time in Paris and Munich improving his foreign language skills. In 1907, he was naturalized as a British subject in order to take the civil service examination, which he passed, and then took an Admiralty job, lasting just over a year. His first poem was published during that time. Chandler disliked the servility of the civil service and resigned, to the consternation of his family, and became a reporter for the ''Daily Express'' and the Bristol ''Western Gazette'' newspapers. He was an unsuccessful journalist, published reviews and continued writing romantic poetry. An encounter with the slightly older Richard Barham Middleton is said to have influenced him into postponing his career as writer. "I met... also a young, bearded, and sad-eyed man called Richard Middleton... Shortly afterwards he committed suicide in Antwerp, a suicide of despair, I should say. The incident made a great impression on me, because Middleton struck me as having far more talent than I was ever likely to possess; and if he couldn't make a go of it, it wasn't very likely that I could." Accounting for that time he said, "Of course in those days as now there were... clever young men who made a decent living as freelances for the numerous literary weeklies" but "I was distinctly not a clever young man. Nor was I at all a happy young man." In 1912, he borrowed money from his Waterford uncle, who expected it to be repaid with interest, and returned to America, visiting his aunt and uncle before settling in San Francisco for a time, where he took a correspondence bookkeeping course, finishing ahead of schedule, and where his mother joined him in late 1912. Eventually they moved to Los Angeles in 1913. Along the way he strung tennis rackets, picked fruit and endured a time of scrimping and saving. Once in Los Angeles he found steady employment with The Los Angeles Creamery. In 1917, when the US entered World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, saw combat in the trenches in France with the Gordon Highlanders, and was undergoing flight training in the fledgling Royal Air Force (RAF) when the war ended.〔 After the armistice, he returned to Los Angeles by way of Canada, and soon began a love affair with Cissy Pascal, a married woman 18 years his senior, and the step-mother of Gordon Pascal, with whom Chandler had enlisted.〔 Cissy amicably divorced her husband Julian in 1920, but Chandler's mother disapproved of the relationship and refused to sanction the marriage. For the next four years Chandler supported both his mother and Cissy; on Florence Chandler's death on September 26, 1923, he was free to marry Cissy, and did so on February 6, 1924.〔〔's Shamus Town] Timeline and Residences pages using official government sources (death certificate, census, military & civil – city & phone directories).〕 Having begun in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor, Chandler was by 1931 a highly paid vice-president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate; but his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees, and threatened suicides〔 all contributed to his dismissal a year later. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Raymond Chandler」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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