Raymond Chandler

London-based journalist Tom Hiney does particularly good work assessing the impact an English public school education had on this most American of writers (1888-1959), the man who turned hard-boiled detective stories into literature with novels like The Big Sleep. But the author is equally acute in discussing Chandler's years as an oil executive in Los Angeles, his marriage to a woman 18 years his senior, his alcoholism, and the Philip Marlowe mysteries that made him rich and famous in middle age. A sympathetic, unflinching look at a gifted artist and very unhappy man.