Tom Hiney

“We are what we are before God and nothing more.” —St. Anthony of Padua In an interview given to The Tablet in 1989, two years before he died, Graham Greene described himself as “a Catholic agnostic” and added that there were two things keeping him from losing his faith altogether. The first was the moment in the Fourth Gospel when Peter and John ran to the tomb: “It just seems to me to be first-hand reportage, and I can’t help believing it . . .

Raymond Chandler is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable names in crime fiction. The writer pioneered an entirely new style, featuring a complex sleuth who struggles to prevail against a corrupt system. Chandler’s brainchild was Philip Marlowe, the quintessential detective character that came to define the hardboiled style. Throughout his career, Chandler wrote seven novels and a great deal of short stories.

Raymond Chandler is an uncensored look at the tortured man who wrote the classic mystery novels The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Using recently uncovered archival materials, including personal papers and correspondence, biographer Thomas Hiney vividly evokes Chandler’s early years in Nebraska, his education in England and on the corrupt streets of Los Angeles, and his later years as a novelist and screenwriter in the heyday of the Hollywood studio system.