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Raymond Chandler dominates the crime novel in the way that Anton Chekhov dominates the short story - it's almost impossible to imagine the genre as we know it today without being conscious of the long shadow he has cast over almost all writers that followed him. Chandler was born in Chicago but schooled in England and eventually became a British citizen, but for all that his voice is quintessentially American.

In the seven novels he wrote - and the twenty or so short stories - he took the trashy pulp-fiction, hardboiled detective story and turned it into something highly sophisticated and nuanced - some might say profound.

Central to this achievement is the creation of his main protagonist, Philip Marlowe (who appears in all seven novels), a private detective of culture and scruples, not to say inner demons. “Down those mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” Chandler wrote of Marlowe (named after the Elizabethan playwright, another tormented soul, as was Chandler himself).

The 50 Greatest Crime Writers

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Marlowe can be as brutally tough as Sam Spade or as uncertain and troubled as a Kafka hero. Add this persona to a prose style of limpid assurance and a feel for atmosphere as good as you'll find in any fiction, and one quickly understands why Raymond Chandler bestrides the genre like a giant.

One could argue that his plots were not perfectly worked out, in the traditional crime novel manner, but I sense that for Chandler plot was a means to an end, a framework on which he could hang his dark musings on human nature and his wonderful evocations of the ambience of southern California. He is a great writer of place. The overall accomplishment of Chandler's fiction is exemplary and enormously influential.

One to read: The Big Sleep (1939)

William Boyd is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Born in Ghana, he was educated at the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. A Good Man in Africa won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1981, while Boyd was an English lecturer at Oxford. He was selected as one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in 1983. His most recent novel is the espionage thriller Restless.

Audio: Raymond Chandler talks to Ian Fleming

The case for Raymond Chandler, on Salon

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