Raymond Chandler 50th Anniversary

  Raymond Chandler, 50 years without him 

Fill the gaps with the past forms of the following verbs:

 study, work, marry,  publish, form, die, drink, grow up, return, be born.

Raymond Chandler in Chicago (July 22 1888), but in England, after the divorce of his parents. He also in France and Germany. He became a naturalized British subject in 1907 in order to enter the Army. Yet, after six months he resigned and between 1908 and   as a teacher and a journalist.

He to the USA in 1912, when he was 24, and was in the Canadian Army during the Great War. Later, he worked in a bank, and in an oil company.

In 1924, when he was 36, he Cissy Hurlburt, 17 years older than him.

When he was 45 he became a full time writer. He his first story: Blackmailers don’t shoot, in the most important crime pulp of the moment, Black Mask.

 In his stories he tried to improve the style of crime writers to  be more humane and ambitious. He took the language of the street, and made it sing.

His next story, Killer in the Rain, part, five years later, of his first novel, The Big Sleep.

Here we see the first appearance of Philip Marlowe, a 38 year old idealistic, honest private investigator, but tough and cynical at the same time, with a strong and individual sense of justice, fond of whiskey and women.

Other novels by Chandler are The Long Goodbye or Farewell, my Lady.

In 1954 his wife He attempted suicide (what he later called the most inept suicide attempt in history), and he a lot. In 1959 he died, at the age of 70.

We remember him as one of the great American literary stylists, capable of writing lines like these:

   “Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumor, except that the cop would rather cure it with a blackjack.”

 A blackjack                     Frozen fish

And now, the beginning of the film The Big Sleep, from Chandler's novel. Stars: Bogart and Bacall: