"Had my books been any worse," Raymond Chandler said, "I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come." As this entertaining biography relates, Chandler's career as a writer of novels and screenplays was a great success, critically and financially, though he did not begin until he was middleaged. Before then, he was a well-paid Los Angeles oil-company executive until he drank himself out of a job. Among motion picture script-writers drunkenness from morning to night was not an obvious liability. He was well qualified to create the archetypal hardboiled, wise-cracking private eye Philip Marlowe, who in turn did a lot to fortify Humphrey Bogart's screen persona.
Chandler had a long, happy marriage, unusual in his trade. His work was admired by a wide variety of writers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Steinbeck, Perelman, Auden, Maugham and even Edith Sitwell.