Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 but lived abroad, primarily in England, from the time he was seven until he was in his mid-twenties. Chandler's mother, Florence Thornton, was Anglo-Irish and, after the collapse of her marriage to the hard-drinking Maurice Chandler, she left America with her son. Looked after by Florence's brother Ernest, they lived in South London, and, from 1900 until 1904, Chandler was a day boy at Dulwich College. Chandler's English upbringing is one of the factors most often invoked to explain his individual shaping of American hard-boiled detective fiction. Arguably the experience that gave him both a mastery of language and his abiding sense of integrity, honour and decency, his English …
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