RAYMOND CHANDLER did not have a happy life. Born in 1888 in Chicago to a pair of lapsed Quakers from Co Waterford, he was soon semi-orphaned when his alcoholic father, Maurice, decamped, leaving baby Ray and his mother Florence to fend for themselves. Never, over the course of his life, did he seek to find his errant father, but his biographer still speculates that the missing parent was the cause of a lot of the son's emotional instability.
Florence returned to Ireland, then went to live in London with her brother Ernest, whose guardianship of his nephew was purely financial and often grudging. Dressed in Eton collar and black coat, Raymond joined Dulwich College as a day boy, and found school a relief after the claustrophobic atmosphere of his uncle's house. He did well academically but had his nose broken playing rugby and henceforth became a sporting spectator.
Having the talent but not the money, Chandler did not go on to university, but his uncle did pay his expenses to do the European tour. He found languages easy to pick up, but appears to have had no sexual adventures. Back in London he joined the Civil Service, found it unutterably boring left after five months and took up journalism. This also failed to hold him and, in 1912, he set sail for America, promising to send for his mother when he found a job.
On the way over he was befriended by the well-educated and avant-garde Lloyd family from Los Angeles, and was encouraged by them to consider moving to LA, where they promised to provide him with introductions. After a number of stops along the way, he finally made it to the East Coast, settled in San Francisco for a time and taught himself book-keeping.
Moving on to Los Angeles, he got a job in the accounting department of a creamery, sent for his mother and tried to find contentment in his rather humdrum life. But boredom was never far away and in 1917 he journeyed to Canada, where he joined the Gordon Highlanders, was shipped to France and experienced trench warfare. Knocked unconscious by a German shell, he was repatriated and again took up where he had left off in L.A.
The young man who joined the Canadian army with Chandler was called Gordan Pascal, and when Chandler met his step-mother, Cissy, he immediately fell in love with her. Although she was still married, Cissy reciprocated his passion, an amicable divorce was arranged and, in 1924, the two of them became husband and wife. Chandler was aware that his wife was older than he, but it is not certain if he knew at the time that the age difference was 19 years.
In spite of this he remained devoted to her and, when she finally died after a long illness, he wrote most movingly: "For thirty years, ten months and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say. She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound."
In 1920s California the oil business was the one to be in, and Chandler soon found his niche there. He made a great amount of money in a very short time, but again his chronic restlessness and burgeoning alcoholism served to discommode him. He lost his job, became increasingly reclusive and moved with Cissy from one seedy apartment to another around the suburbs of L.A.
He had always dabbled at writing, mainly composing poetry, but the proliferation of pulp crime magazines inspired him to try his hand at the genre. His first stories were similar to the type being published in such magazines as Black Mask, but then he began to infuse them with an individuality of style and expression that showed he had a rare aptitude for the techniques involved.
In 1939 he produced his first Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep. It was not immediately successful, but he persevered and at fairly regular intervals over the 1940s brought out Farewell My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake and The Little Sister. His 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye, marked the end of his truly creative period, and although he did write one further Marlowe book, Playback, his amazing success and lasting fame rest really on a corpus of only six volumes.
Mr Hiney, in his vibrant and entertaining biography, spends a lot of time seeking reasons for the phenomenal popularity of the Marlowe syndrome, in part coming to the conclusion that this honest detective traversing the mean streets was the right man at the right time in a world racked by war and highly anxious for role-model heroes. There is also no doubt that Chandler was a stylist whose work is immediately recognisable - he has had many imitators, but no one has ever come close to the original. This was apparent some years ago when the crime writer, Robert B. Parker, tried to finish Chandler's unfinished Poodle Springs and failed abysmally.
Asked once by a journalist if he ever read his own fiction, Chandler replied: "Yes, and at the very risk of being called an egotistical twerp, I find it damn hard to put down. Even me that knows all about it. There must be some magic in the writing after all, but I take no credit for it. It just happens, like red hair."
His final years, after Cissy's death, were miserable in the extreme. He tried to make a new life for himself in London, but his increasing dependence on alcohol made him very hard to deal with, and even the faithful train of women who fell under his spell eventually despaired of him. He went back to California and died there in 1959. Seventeen people attended his burial at San Diego's Mount Hope state cemetery in plot number 1577-3-8, but years earlier he had framed his own valediction when he wrote at the end of The Big Sleep:
"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that."