Raymond Chandler Raymond Chandler Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became 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 the time of his death, was completed by Robert B.
Raymond Chandler his secretary; Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's widow); and Natasha Spender (Stephen Spender's wife). Chandler regained his U.S. citizenship in 1956. After a respite in England, he returned to La Jolla. He died at Scripps Memorial Hospital of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia (according to the death certificate) in 1959. Helga Greene inherited Chandler's $60,000 estate, after prevailing in a 1960 lawsuit filed by Fracasse contesting Chandler's holographic codicil to his will. Chandler is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, in San Diego, California. As Frank MacShane noted in his biography, "The Life of Raymond Chandler", Chandler wished to be