Raymond Chandler: Biography review

 Raymond Chandler in the late 1930s, has been the one to use the ever rising POP music genre culture to evade and setup very interesting stories about murder mystery which went on to become not only best sellers but also epitomise the cynicism and world-weariness of a generation that had to survive two world wars.

Chandler himself was quite a colourful character in his own way, it is due these reason only that his biography by the British journalist Tom Hiney offers one a detailed portrait of his life.
The book devotes a third of itself to Chandler’s childhood and youth. Born to an Irish immigrant mother and an alcoholic father in Chicago during 1888, Chandler and his mother were  abandoned and made their way back to his native  country Ireland.

There he lived under the charity of his graceful uncle who continually reminded him  of their obligations and shortcomings.
Nonetheless, his uncle did not deny Chandler a good education and he joined  Dulwich College in 1900, the year that P G Wodehouse left the same school. Here he received an excellent grounding in Classical literature, a factor that was to raise his stories of street crime far above the writing of the average pulp hack writer.

He tried a  variety of professions, including journalist, poet and oil company executive, in both England and the United States, before he finally settled down to writing as a full-time profession. During his days as an amatuer writer his mother became ill and had to give his job away to take care of her.

Chandler actually taught himself to write, in a systematic way.
He read hundreds of pulp magazines, drew upon his own knowledge of the back streets of Los Angeles and the corruption within its police force,  his hand at analysing the source of Chandler’s writing and the factors that influenced it, and indeed, this biography is packed with detail, of the period as well as of the man in question, but the book might have benefited from a closer attention to the factual details of Chandler’s stories.

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