Raymond Chandler is "The Big Sleep" (1946), by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. William Faulkner was a co-writer of the screenplay. Chandler's few screenwriting efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved stylistically and thematically influential on the American "film noir" genre. Notable for its revised take on both the Marlowe character, transplanting the novel to the 1970s, is Robert Altman's 1973 neo-noir adaptation of "The Long Goodbye". Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field. Raymond Chandler Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23,
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