Raymond Chandler bibliography drinking. He began writing crime stories for the pulp magazines "Black Mask", "Detective Fiction Weekly", "The Fortnightly Intruder" and "Dime Detective". The stories were subsequently brought together in collected editions. In 1939, at the behest of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., Chandler wrote his first novel, "The Big Sleep", for which he used parts of his short stories "Killer in the Rain" (1935) and "The Curtain" (1936). He went on to write seven novels, many of which featured the character Philip Marlowe. In 1944 Chandler was asked by Paramount Pictures to write the script for the film "Double Indemnity"
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