Graham Marks, Guest Editor for August 2010, remembers: "My dad gave me his own Penguin edition of Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (which I still have) when I was about 14. I took it with me when I went back to school, where it was promptly confiscated as ‘unsuitable reading material’ - a decision which, much to my delight, my dad got reversed. Chandler has been one of my favourite authors ever since then, the master of tight plots, snappy dialogue and sharp characterisation. Reading this book was the start of my love affair with detective fiction and also Los Angeles, where the story is set."
Philip Marlowe's on a case: his client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband's collection. That's the simple part. It becomes more complicated when Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. That's also unlucky for a private investigator, because leaving a trail of corpses around LA gets cops' noses out of joint. If Marlowe doesn't wrap this one up fast, he's going to end up in jail or worse, in a box in the ground.
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to England with his family when he was twelve. He attended Dulwich College, Alma Mater to some of the twentieth century’s most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married.
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 by his first novel. The Big Sleep introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the often imitated but never-bettered hard-boiled private investigator. It is in Marlowe’s long shadow that every fictional detective must stand – and under the influence of Raymond Chandler’s addictive prose that every crime author must write.
