In , at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, " Blackmailers Don't Shoot ", was published in in Black Mask , a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep , was published in In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once.
In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature.
He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett , James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe , like Hammett's Sam Spade , is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective". Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart , whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe. Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his " The Simple Art of Murder " is the canonical essay in the field.
The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honorβby instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebelliousβan innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker.
Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.
