Burning Witches

Michael Rogin

  • Raymond Chandler: A Biography by Tom Hiney
    Chatto, 310 pp, £16.99, May 1997, ISBN 0 7011 6310 0
  • Raymond Chandler Speaking edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker
    California, 288 pp, £10.95, May 1997, ISBN 0 520 20835 8

In 1955, the Daily Express conducted a poll to discover the most popular celebrities according to highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow tastes. Raymond Chandler and Marilyn Monroe were, as Chandler put it. ‘the only ones that made all three brows’. Chandler shattered cultural barriers with Philip Marlowe, private investigator, immortalised on the screen by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, mortalised by Dick Powell and Robert Montgomery during Chandler’s lifetime, and afterwards by Elliot Gould, Robert Mitchum and James Garner. He was the hero of the most listened to radio detective serial in history, and, by the time Chandler died in 1959, had sold over five million books.

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