Happy Birthday, Raymond Chandler

“Tall, aren’t you?” she said.

“I didn’t mean to be.”
Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

The above quote in the Paris Review brought back a lot of memories.

Raymond Chandler, master of the hard-boiled detective genre, was born on this day in 1888. Once I got my first taste of Marlowe's witty crime fiction I was hooked. I read everything he'd ever written.
An eon ago a friend who knew I was an avid  Raymond Chandler fan screened a t-shirt for me with Philip Marlowe's face and the words "Not peculiar - just uninhibited" across the front. I wore that shirt until it was a faded rag.

This might be my all time favourite Marlowe quote:

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

If you enjoy Marlowe's snappy patter you'll like this site.