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 the quintessential Marlowe. At least three of Chandler's novels have been regarded as masterpieces: "Farewell, My Lovely" (1940), "The Little Sister" (1949), and "The Long Goodbye" (1953). "The Long Goodbye" was praised in 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". Chandler's reputation has grown in recent years. Chandler was born in 1888 in Chicago, the son of Florence Dart (Thornton) and Maurice Benjamin Chandler. He spent his early