Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. Chandler embarked on his career in detective fiction writing in 1932, at the age of forty-four, after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His debut short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a renowned pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, appeared in 1939. Over his lifetime, Chandler published seven novels (with an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, completed by Robert B. Parker). Except for Playback, all have been adapted into films, some multiple times.

In the year before his passing, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. Chandler's work had a significant stylistic impact on American popular literature. He is credited as a pioneer of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, alongside Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and other writers from Black Mask. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, has become synonymous with the concept of the private detective, much like Hammett's Sam Spade. Both characters have been portrayed in films by Humphrey Bogart, who is often viewed as the quintessential Marlowe. The Big Sleep was ranked second in the Crime Writers Association poll of the 100 best crime novels; other works such as Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953) also made the list.

Chandler was a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" is considered canonical in the field. He famously wrote about the ideal detective: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." Chandler's creation, Marlowe, is described as the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical, and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.