Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler came late to fiction. He was an oil company executive until the Depression cost him his job at forty-four, and he taught himself to write for the pulps, selling his first story to Black Mask in 1933. The seven novels he published in his lifetime gave American crime writing a first-person voice that other writers have been borrowing ever since: Philip Marlowe, wisecracks laid over an old-fashioned code, and a Los Angeles described with more affection than it deserved. He also wrote for Hollywood, most famously on Double Indemnity, and his essay The Simple Art of Murder remains the sharpest attack on the polite English detective story.