Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an Anglo-American crime writer who had an immense stylistic influence upon the modern private eye story, especially in the style of the writing and the attitudes now characteristic of the genre. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, is synonymous with "private detective," along with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.

Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888, but moved to Britain in 1895 with his Irish-born mother after they were abandoned by his father, an alcoholic civil engineer who worked for an American railway company. His uncle, a successful lawyer, supported them. In 1900, after attending a local school in Upper Norwood, Chandler was classically educated at Dulwich College, London (the public school that also taught P.G. Wodehouse to write prose and which also taught C. S. Forester). He did not attend university, instead spending time in Paris and Munich. In 1907, he was naturalised as a British subject in order to take the Civil Service examination, which he passed with the third-highest score. He then took an Admiralty job lasting just over a year. His first poem was published during that time.

Chandler disliked the servility of the civil service and resigned, to the consternation of his family, becoming a reporter for the Daily Express and the Bristol Western Gazette newspapers. He was an unsuccessful journalist, published reviews and continued writing Romantic poetry. Accounting for that time he said, "Of course in those days as now there were...clever young men who made a decent living as freelances for the numerous literary weeklies..." but "...I was distinctly not a clever young man. Nor was I at all a happy young man."