Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but moved to England with his family when he was twelve. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler died in 1959.