The life of Raymond Chandler has long been obscured by secrets and half-truths as deceptive as anything in his novel The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters, and archives, Tom Williams casts a new light on this mysterious writer, a man troubled by loneliness and desertion. It was only during middle age, after his alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction. And his legacy--the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe--endures, compelling generations of crime writers. In this long-awaited biography, Tom Williams shadows one of the true literary giants of the twentieth century and considers how crime writing was raised to the level of art.