History of crime fiction quite complicated, forcing him to embark on an odyssey through the urban landscape. He is involved with organized crime and other lowlifes on the "mean streets" of, preferably, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police. It is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself. As Raymond Chandler's protagonist Philip Marlowe—immortalized by actor Humphrey Bogart in the movie adaptation (1946) of the novel "The Big Sleep" (1939)—admits to his client, General Sternwood, he finds it rather tiresome, as an individualist, to
Raymond Chandler university, who speaks some Spanish and sometimes admires Mexicans, and who is a student of chess and classical music. He is a man who refuses a prospective client's fee for a job he considers unethical. The high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his lifetime. In a March 1942 letter to Blanche Knopf, published in "Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler", he wrote, "The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder,