Raymond Chandler

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Raymond Chandler is the most influential detective fiction writer ever. He said of Philip Marlowe "He is the hero, he is everything," and it's no understatement to say that the majority of fictional detectives since are his descendants.

Chandler didn't take up writing fiction until he was in his forties. Thrown out of work when the oil company he worked for went bust in the Depression, he turned to writing for the pulps, and hit upon the central idea of all his books: the detective as knight. In fact, Philip Marlowe was nearly named Mallory, after the author of The Death Of Arthur, the definitive tale of chivalry.

We don't know much about Marlowe's past. We know he used to be a policeman, and we sense there's a long-ago loss that still saddens him, but all we really know is what we read in the books. As Woody Haut points out in Pulp Culture, Marlowe is a lonely man in a lonely town. The characters in Chandler's stories are disconnected; love and friendship are usually shams. This makes sincere relationships even more precious, but they're fragile, and usually come to naught (General Sternwood and Reagan in The Big Sleep, Marlowe and Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbyt, and the lovers in "Red Wind"). Marlowe tries to shield the innocent, but usually can only watch and drop a cynical wisecrack.

Although much copied, Chandler's lonely vision of a single good man making his way down the "mean streets" of Los Angeles still has the power to move today. Many critics (this one included) consider his The Long Goodbye to be the most successful attempt to write detective fiction outside of the genre, fiction that can stand on its own among other literature.