When Chandler was 12, his mother took the family to England. He was educated at Dulwich College in London and thereafter spent some time in France and Germany. In 1907, he became a British citizen and joined the civil service. More interested in writing than bureaucracy, Chandler left the service after only a year and joined the staff of the Daily Express as a reporter,but again was not suited to the task and in 1912, returned to America. For a short time he lived in San Francisco, but eventually settled in Los Angeles. During World War I, he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and saw action with the Gordon Highlanders in France. Following the War and for the next 15 years, Chandler held a number of jobs, basically living from day to day during the Depression. In 1933, he finally published his first work, Blackmailers Don't Shoot in Black Mask magazine and clearly found his genre - the detective story. In 1939, he introduced the iconic detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, a hugely successful work which was made into a film in 1946 with Humphrey Bogart playing the lead. He followed in 1940 with the powerful Farewell, My Lovely, a modern detective masterpiece. Chandler only produced seven novels during his life, but also wrote many short stories and some screenplays, the latter including Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train in 1951. After the death of his wife Cissy in 1954, Chandler became even more depressed and turned more and more to the bottle. An attempted suicide in 1955 was followed by a visit to England which seemed to lift his spirits. He regained his US citizenship in 1956. His other works included Killer in the Rain (1935), The Curtain (1936), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Simple Art of Murder (1944), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953) and Playback (1958).