Big Sleep & Farewell, My Lovely

Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures - is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The hard-boiled detective's iconic image burns just as brightly in Farewell My Lovely, on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner.

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since., One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards that others still try to attain.

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but moved to England with his family when he was twelve. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler died in 1959.