Raymond Chandler (Magill Book Reviews)

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 but grew up in Ireland and England. At age twelve he entered Dulwich College, where he absorbed the classical education and conservative moral values of the typical English public school. The combination of an elitist education and struggle for survival on the mean streets of American cities explains the intriguing texture of Chandler’s fiction and the complexity of his hero Philip Marlowe.

Biographer Tom Hiney lives in London and writes for the SPECTATOR and the LONDON OBSERVER. This young professional journalist has turned out a very readable biography in RAYMOND CHANDLER: A BIOGRAPHY, but has apparently done so without going to Los Angeles, the scene of Chandler’s now classic Philip Marlowe detective novels, or conducting any personal interviews. Hiney discusses all of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels but gives amazingly simplistic synopses which make them sound like little more than stereotypical potboilers full of hoods, molls, slick gamblers, and crooked cops. Hiney’s book is thoroughly documented with seventeen pages of endnotes.

Hiney writes from a strictly English perspective, which means that he offers interesting new details about Chandler’s formative years in England and the lionized alcoholic writer’s visits to London in the years before his death. Chandler remains enormously popular in England and has had a strong influence on English writers, including Hiney himself. Hiney contends “that Chandler will outlive most other writers of this century, regardless of his critics.”

Sources for Further Study

Atlanta Journal Constitution. July 6, 1997, p. L8.

Booklist. XCIII, April 15, 1997, p. 1404.

Chicago Tribune. June 29, 1997, XIV, p. 2.

Library Journal. CXXII, April, 1997, p. 92.

Maclean’s. CX, July 1, 1997, p. 111.

National Review. XLIX, September 29, 1997, p. 58.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, June 22, 1997, p. 12.

Newsweek. CXXX, July 14, 1997, p. 68.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIV, March 31, 1997, p. 52.

The Spectator. CCLXXVIII, May 17, 1997, p. 39.

The Times Literary Supplement. June 13, 1997, p. 34.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVII, May 18, 1997, p. 3.