The Chandler Connection
Raymond Chandler came to work for the Dabney Oil syndicate in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor in their Signal Hill (Los Angeles) office. He rose to office manager and vice-president, but was fired in 1932 for drinking, womanizing, and absenteeism. Because he had testified for them in a trial, two of his friends from the oil business offered him $100/month for living expenses. He spent the next year honing his writing skills, and became a master of pulp fiction, turning the hard-boiled detective novel into an art form.
Read more about this topic: Dabney Oil Syndicate
Famous quotes containing the words chandler and/or connection:
“I am ... by tradition and long study a complete snob. P. Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phony.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)