Raymond Thornton Chandler

 Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959)

In 1932, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, Blackmailers Don't Shoot, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, and made into a movie in 1946 starring Humphrey Bogart. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). He died of pneumonial peripheral vascular shock and prerenal uremia (according to the death certificate) in 1959, and buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego,CA.