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.


From Library Journal
"The hell with posterity, I want mine now," Chandler once stated in a letter to a friend. He got his wish, making fortunes in his lifetime both as an oil-company executive and a writer, and since his death in 1959 he has been hailed not only as one of the nation's greatest mystery authors but one of American literature's Olympians, period. This biography, the first major title on Chandler in 20 years, unfortunately fires mostly blanks. Hiney, a London journalist, neatly delivers the facts of Chandler's life but offers little analysis of his subject's actions and work. He insists Chandler was an artist rather than a pulp whodunit hack, yet he rarely digs beyond plot description into Chandler's fiction. The book is at its best when following Chandler's point-blank handling of his alcoholism. Though the text is often repetitious and contains some errors, it nonetheless will imbibe readers with a working knowledge of the subject's life. Chandler, however, deserves a stronger portrait.?Michael Rogers, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
Hiney skillfully sorts out the successive phases of this sometimes troubled and muddled life. Impressive and illuminating.


Kansas City Star
Tom Hiney's Raymond Chandler fills a major gap, if not in American literature then certainly in American popular culture.


The San Diego Union Tribune
Hiney is a savvy Chandler fan and an entertaining writer.Hiney is at his best in digging away at his sources for the rounding detail and getting it down where it counts most.


From Booklist
That the creator of Philip Marlowe would have lived an agonized, largely unhappy life should come as no surprise to readers of the handful of classic novels and stories in which Marlowe bemoans the gumshoe's lonely lot. Yet the nature of Raymond Chandler's agony couldn't be more different from that of his prototypical hard-boiled hero. Born in America but raised in England, Chandler had a public-school education, wrote poetry, immigrated to America, married a woman nearly 20 years his senior, became an oil executive in 1920s Los Angeles before losing it all to booze, and finally wrote his first novel, The Big Sleep, when he was 50. As Hiney portrays him in this compelling biography, Chandler emerges as a man torn between opposites--a drunk and a teetotaler; a devoted husband and a Hollywood carouser; a poet and a pulp writer. This first biography of Chandler in 20 years makes a nice complement to Frank MacShane's earlier Life of Raymond Chandler (1976). Hiney's coverage of Chandler's strange marriage and his pre-novelist life adds much to MacShane's treatment of those topics, but MacShane remains the more astute critic and certainly the more stylish writer. For a complete picture of the life and work of the most influential of all hard-boiled novelists, libraries should have both biographies on their shelves. Bill Ott


From Kirkus Reviews
A disappointing new biography of the nonpareil hardboiled writer. Alcoholic, fastidious, prickly, chivalrous, classically educated, Chandler was a bundle of contradictions. A legendary misogynist in fiction, he was devoted for most of his life to a much older wife. When she died, he obsessively sought solace in drink and the company of other women. He was also, on Hiney's showing, a man with a rare inaptness for comfort or self- satisfaction, a writer who found work painfully difficult yet became unmoored away from his desk, whose success as a screenwriter never mitigated his contempt for Hollywood, and a man to whom both reclusiveness (he wrote the first four Philip Marlowe novels in isolation from anyone but his beloved wife, Cissy) and socialization (his final year was punctuated by so many marriage proposals that two of his aspiring fianc‚es ended up in court over his will) were equally necessary and equally impossible. Readers who know Frank MacShane's 1976 biography of Chandler will be familiar with these matters. What London journalist Hiney adds is a new look at the Chandler archives and new interviews with the friends of his declining years; what's missing is any forceful new assessment of Chandler's personality and achievement as a writer. Hiney's inexperience as a biographer shows in his lack of confidence in his generalizations about Chandler's alcoholism, his early critical reception (though Chandler scorned highbrow intellectuals, they were faster to appreciate his work than mainstream reviewers), and his still- debated status in American letters. On Chandler's troubled personal life, Hiney admits that ``Cissy remains almost as much of an enigma now'' as when she and Chandler married, and ventures the conclusion, on slender grounds, that ``Chandler was, I am sure, a good man and an honest one.'' Hiney ends up nibbling around the edges of Chandler's life and work, as if he'd bitten off more than he could chew. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Described by Evelyn Waugh in the late 1940s as "the greatest living American novelist," Raymond Chandler won the admiration of millions of fans, in addition to the more astute praise of writers such as T.S. Eliot and Edmund Wilson for his Philip Marlowe detective novels. He was central to the birth of what became known as film noir - for both the movies he wrote in Hollywood and those that were made from his books - and has been credited as the inspiration for the classic film, Chinatown. For this major new biography, Tom Hiney has had access to unseen personal papers, as well as previously unrecorded accounts of those who knew Chandler throughout his life. In the first biography in over twenty years, Hiney takes an uncensored look at Chandler's life as an author, a husband, a screenwriter, and occasional rogue. Vividly, Hiney evokes the strange early years before Chandler was a writer, brings alive the dangerous glamour of the Hollywood era in which he flourished, and puts his screenwriting in the context of the organized crime and corruption of Los Angeles during Prohibition. He gives illuminating details of Chandler's alcohol addiction - which plagued him off and on throughout his life - his friendships with Howard Hawks, "Lucky" Luciano, and Alfred Hitchcock, and fully records for the first time Chandler's most intimate friendship - with Cissy, his wife of thirty years, seventeen years his senior.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Hiney, a journalist for the Spectator and the London Observer, offers a prismatic view into the life of novelist Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959). In addition to using previously published material by and about Chandler from both familiar and little-known sources, Hiney peered into university archives for a close inspection of Chandler's correspondence and notebooks. Hiney traces the writer's nomadic childhood from pre-Mafia Chicago to pre-telephone Nebraska, from Quaker Ireland and Edwardian England to his education south of London at Dulwich College and his 1913 arrival in the "mean streets" of Los Angeles, the later setting for his crime fiction. As recluse, oil executive, poet, screenwriter and gentlemen charmer, Chandler was "beyond eccentric" to those who came in contact with him. Living at over 100 addresses, he sustained no long friendships, and was "variously rich, poor, drunk, teetotal, sacked, married and suicidal." Not until age 50 did he move from pulps to Alfred Knopf, where the 1939 debut of streetwise Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep attracted some notice in the press. Hiney contrasts critical dismissals with later acclaim, noting that the current popularity of "Chandleresque writers" (James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard) and filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino) has triggered a reappraisal of hardboiled roots. No rough edges have been filed off for this revealing, well-written biography, and Hiney's fast-paced prose, punctuated with the voices of those who knew him well, often evoke edgy atmospherics and dark moods reminiscent of Chandler's own fiction. (May) FYI: In April, University of California will release Raymond Chandler Speaking, a collection of the writer's letters, articles and notes on publishing, cats, crime and more edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker ($12.95 paper, 275p ISBN 0-520-20835-8)

Library Journal

"The hell with posterity, I want mine now," Chandler once stated in a letter to a friend. He got his wish, making fortunes in his lifetime both as an oil-company executive and a writer, and since his death in 1959 he has been hailed not only as one of the nation's greatest mystery authors but one of American literature's Olympians, period. This biography, the first major title on Chandler in 20 years, unfortunately fires mostly blanks. Hiney, a London journalist, neatly delivers the facts of Chandler's life but offers little analysis of his subject's actions and work. He insists Chandler was an artist rather than a pulp whodunit hack, yet he rarely digs beyond plot description into Chandler's fiction. The book is at its best when following Chandler's point-blank handling of his alcoholism. Though the text is often repetitious and contains some errors, it nonetheless will imbibe readers with a working knowledge of the subject's life. Chandler, however, deserves a stronger portrait.Michael Rogers, "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

A disappointing new biography of the nonpareil hardboiled writer.

Alcoholic, fastidious, prickly, chivalrous, classically educated, Chandler was a bundle of contradictions. A legendary misogynist in fiction, he was devoted for most of his life to a much older wife. When she died, he obsessively sought solace in drink and the company of other women. He was also, on Hiney's showing, a man with a rare inaptness for comfort or self- satisfaction, a writer who found work painfully difficult yet became unmoored away from his desk, whose success as a screenwriter never mitigated his contempt for Hollywood, and a man to whom both reclusiveness (he wrote the first four Philip Marlowe novels in isolation from anyone but his beloved wife, Cissy) and socialization (his final year was punctuated by so many marriage proposals that two of his aspiring fiancées ended up in court over his will) were equally necessary and equally impossible. Readers who know Frank MacShane's 1976 biography of Chandler will be familiar with these matters. What London journalist Hiney adds is a new look at the Chandler archives and new interviews with the friends of his declining years; what's missing is any forceful new assessment of Chandler's personality and achievement as a writer. Hiney's inexperience as a biographer shows in his lack of confidence in his generalizations about Chandler's alcoholism, his early critical reception (though Chandler scorned highbrow intellectuals, they were faster to appreciate his work than mainstream reviewers), and his still- debated status in American letters. On Chandler's troubled personal life, Hiney admits that "Cissy remains almost as much of an enigma now" as when she and Chandler married, and ventures the conclusion, on slender grounds, that "Chandler was, I am sure, a good man and an honest one."

Hiney ends up nibbling around the edges of Chandler's life and work, as if he'd bitten off more than he could chew.