Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter who turned to detective fiction in 1932, at age 44, after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His novels center on the private detective Philip Marlowe, who appears in The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, and The Long Goodbye. Chandler helped found the hardboiled school of detective fiction and wrote the essay "The Simple Art of Murder," which remains a standard piece of criticism in the field. He died in 1959.