Raymond Chandler bibliography

[1][2] After working briefly for the British Civil Service, he became a part-time teacher at Dulwich, supplementing his income as a journalist and writer—mostly for The Westminster Gazette and The Academy.

[2] His output—consisting largely of poems and essays—was not to his taste, and his biographer Paul Bishop considers the work as "lifeless", while Contemporary Authors describes it as "lofty in subject and mawkish in tone".

[5] Chandler returned to the US in 1919 to rekindle his literary career, but instead took a job with an oil company until he was fired in 1932 following a bout of depression, womanizing and heavy drinking.

[6] Selected stories from The Simple Art of Murder were subsequently published in additional paperback and hardcover editions.

[7] In 1939, at the behest of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., Chandler wrote his first novel, The Big Sleep, for which he used parts of his short stories "Killer in the Rain" (1935) and "The Curtain" (1936).