Raymond Chandler Started at 44, Debuted at 51
Quick answer: Fired from an oil company at 44, Raymond Chandler taught himself pulp fiction and published The Big Sleep in 1939, the great late start in crime writing.
In 1932, in the middle of the Depression, a 44 year old oil executive in Los Angeles was fired. He had been well paid and well regarded once, but the drinking had got out of hand, the absences had piled up, and the Dabney Oil Syndicate finally let him go. He had a wife, thin savings, and no obvious prospects. His name was Raymond Chandler, and at that point he had published nothing anyone remembered: some earnest poems and essays in London magazines two decades earlier, then silence.
What happened next is one of the most instructive late starts in modern writing. Chandler did not sit down and pour out a masterpiece. He enrolled himself, in effect, as an apprentice in a trade he did not know, at an age when most people assume the apprenticeships are over. Seven years later he published The Big Sleep, and detective fiction was never quite the same.
The Morning the Oil Business Let Him Go
Chandler's firing was not a noble injustice. By his own later admission, alcohol had wrecked his performance, and the company had reasons. That detail matters, because writers love a story in which the world wrongs the artist and the artist answers with genius. Chandler's story is less flattering and more useful: he had made a mess of a respectable career, he was middle aged, and the economy around him was in ruins.
He and his wife Cissy cut their living costs to almost nothing and moved between cheap rented places. Chandler later described this period as one of driving up and down the Pacific coast, reading pulp magazines because they were cheap enough to throw away. Somewhere in that reading, an idea took hold: this was a kind of writing a person could study, practise, and learn.
A False Start Twenty Years Earlier
Chandler had already failed at literature once. Born in Chicago in 1888 and raised partly in England, he was educated at Dulwich College and spent his early twenties in London trying to make it as a poet, essayist and reviewer. The work was mannered and it went nowhere much. He gave up, borrowed money from an uncle, and sailed for America to start over in business.
That earlier failure turned out to be quietly valuable. The classical education gave him an ear for rhythm and an outsider's delight in American slang, which he heard almost as a foreign language, vivid and worth collecting. When he finally found his form, the style that made him famous, wisecracking similes delivered with an Edwardian schoolmaster's precision, came directly out of that odd double life. Nothing a writer learns is wasted; it just sometimes waits twenty years to become useful.
Learning the Pulps Like a Trade
At 45, Chandler set about learning pulp fiction the way a draughtsman learns drawing. He studied the crime magazine Black Mask, where Dashiell Hammett had made his name. He took a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner, the Perry Mason author, and rewrote it from scratch to see how the mechanism worked, then compared his version with the original, an exercise he later described in a letter to Gardner himself.
His first story, Blackmailers Don't Shoot, took him around five months to write, a fact widely reported from his own account. Black Mask published it in December 1933 and paid him at the standard pulp rate, which came to about 180 dollars. Five months of full time work for 180 dollars, at age 45, in the Depression. He kept going.
Seven Years in the Word Mines
Between 1933 and 1938 Chandler published around twenty stories in the pulps, mostly in Black Mask and Dime Detective. He was slow by pulp standards, where the stars produced at a frightening pace, but he was deliberate. He treated each story as a problem in scene building, dialogue and atmosphere, and he was openly more interested in those things than in the whodunit machinery.
When he came to write his first novel, he did something unglamorous and clever: he reused himself. The Big Sleep was built in part by reworking material from his earlier stories, including Killer in the Rain and The Curtain, a method he cheerfully called cannibalizing. The apprentice work became the load bearing structure of the masterpiece. Writers who despair over early pieces that never found readers might note that Chandler's did not find many readers either, at first. They found a better job later.
The Big Sleep and Everything After
The Big Sleep appeared in 1939, in Chandler's fifty first year, and introduced Philip Marlowe, the private detective who narrates in one of the most imitated voices in the language. Farewell, My Lovely followed in 1940, and The Long Goodbye, which many readers consider his best, in 1953. Hollywood came calling too: he worked on the screenplay of Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder and earned Academy Award nominations.
For a writer who wants to see what the fuss is about, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye are the places to start, and his essay The Simple Art of Murder sets out his craft thinking in his own combative voice. Read him for the sentences. The plots famously wobble, and Chandler did not much care; the style, the mood and the moral weariness are the point, and they were built, sentence by sentence, by a man in his late forties doing exercises.
What Chandler's Late Start Teaches
The first lesson is that starting late is not the same as starting from nothing. Chandler arrived at 44 with a trained ear, decades of reading, and a working life's worth of observed human behaviour. If you are coming to writing after years in another field, you are not behind; you are carrying material.
The second lesson is about method. Chandler did not wait for inspiration or trust raw talent. He picked a form, studied its best practitioners, copied their structures as exercises, accepted humiliating pay, and revised relentlessly. That is a plan any writer can copy this month, whatever their age.
What poets can take from this
- Treat your first years in a new form as a paid apprenticeship, even when the pay is nearly nothing.
- Choose one narrow form to master before you spread out; Chandler chose the pulp detective story and stayed there for six years.
- Copying the structure of a story you admire, as a private exercise, is one of the fastest ways to learn plotting.
- Late starters should mine their previous careers for settings, characters and lived detail no younger writer has.
- Slow output is fine if every piece teaches you something you can name.
- Reuse and rework your old unpublished material without guilt; Chandler built novels from it.
Try it yourself
Write a poem or short piece in the voice of someone starting again at midlife: a first day, a first attempt, a skill learned late. Let one concrete object from their old life appear in the new one.
Questions
How old was Raymond Chandler when he published his first novel?
The Big Sleep was published in 1939, when Chandler was in his fifty first year. He had published his first short story only six years earlier, in 1933, at the age of 45.
What did Raymond Chandler do before he became a writer?
He worked for years as an executive in the Los Angeles oil business, at the Dabney Oil Syndicate, after earlier stints in London as a young poet, reviewer and civil servant. He was fired from the oil job in 1932, and only then turned seriously to fiction.
How did Chandler learn to write crime fiction?
He studied pulp magazines, especially Black Mask, and famously rewrote a novelette by Erle Stanley Gardner as a private exercise to understand how it worked. His first story took him about five months to write and earned roughly 180 dollars.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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