Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to London with his mother in 1895, after the divorce of his parents. He enrolled at Dulwich College as a day student in 1900, where he studied both classics and modern languages. After leaving school in 1905 he spent a year in Paris and several months in Germany, in order to improve his languages and prepare for the English Civil Service examinations. He returned to England in 1907 and became a naturalised British subject on 20 May 1907. After passing his exams he was employed as a clerk in the Admiralty. However, he stayed for only six months before resigning in order to try and earn his living as a literary journalist, working first for the Daily Express, then for the Westminster Gazette and the Academy. He was not successful and in 1912 he returned to America and settled in California.

After a variety of jobs, he trained as a book-keeper and worked in Los Angeles until 1917, when he enlisted in the Canadian army. He served in France with the British Columbia Regiment, was wounded, and eventually discharged in 1919. He returned to Los Angeles and began work in the Dabney Oil Syndicate, first in the accounting department, then later as auditor and finally as Vice-President. In 1924 he married Cissy Pascal.

Cissy Pascal (1870-1954) was born Pearl Eugenie Hurlburt. She married: 1. Leon Brown Porcher, 1897, divorced 1904; 2. Julian Pascal (the stage name of the concert pianist and composer Goodridge Bowen) 1911, divorced 1919; 3. Raymond Chandler, 1924-1954. She was eighteen years older than Chandler.

Chandler remained in the oil business for twelve or thirteen years. He was dismissed by Dabney in 1932, at the age of forty-four, chiefly because of his heavy drinking. With the help of an allowance from his friend Edward Lloyd, Chandler spent the next twelve months teaching himself to write short stories, using the so-called 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction as his model. In 1933, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot' was published by Joseph T. Shaw in Black Mask magazine, the first of Chandler's many contributions during the next five years to Black Mask and Crime Detective Magazine. In the spring of 1938 he began work on a full-length novel using one of his Black Mask characters, Philip Marlowe, as a first-person narrator. The Big Sleep was published in 1939 and was an immediate success. It was followed by Farewell My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Good-Bye (1953), and Playback (1958), together with several collections of short stories and articles for magazines. In 1943, Chandler began a fraught connection with Hollywood when he collaborated with Billy Wilder on the screenplay for Double Indemnity (Paramount, 1944), the first of several assignments which also included The Blue Dahlia (Paramount, 1946) and Strangers on a Train (Warner Brothers, 1951).

Cissy Chandler died in 1954, and although Chandler published Playback in 1958 he wrote very little in his remaining years. After an abortive suicide attempt in February 1955, he travelled to England and spent the next three years living partly in London and partly in La Jolla, a neighbourhood of San Diego, California. It was a period marked by tax and nationality problems, by a succession of difficulties involving his relationships with women, and by bouts of hospitalisation. Chandler died in La Jolla on 26 March 1959 and is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego.

Helga Mary Connolly (née Guinness, other married name Greene) (1916-1985), literary agent, was born to Henry Samuel Howard Guinness and Alfhild Holter. She opened The Helga Greene Literary Agency in 1952, operating firstly from Guinness-Mahon, Rathbone Place and finally Eaton Mews West in the house adjoining her own home. Her agency represented authors including American crime writer Raymond Chandler, Austrian artist and poet Oskar Kokoschka and zoologist Lancelot Hogben. She married her first husband Sir Hugh Carleton Greene in 1934 (divorced 1948), the couple had two sons, Graham and James Greene. She was engaged to Raymond Chandler upon his death in 1959. She married her second husband Harry Stuart Connolly in 1963.