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Born in 1970, Tom Hiney is the author of an acclaimed biography of Raymond Chandler and On the Missionary Trail. He worked as a journalist in London before moving to South Africa where he now lives with his wife and son.
Chandler added new dimensions to crime writing, and his influence lives on. This is the most comprehensive and interpretative biography to date of a loner who could never quite relate to the human race as much as he could to the world of his novels, a man who, for all the racy characters in his writing, married a matronly older woman.. Dumped from America on disapproving English relatives, he was the clever Dulwich schoolboy, the accountant, the civil servant, the aspiring Georgian poet and army sergeant in the trenches - where he saw and never forgot the face of death. He was the wealthy oil executive until drink undid him, then came the new stern dedication to writing, the Hollywood and Prohibition years, until his final alcoholic crack-up. Hiney's biography benefits from his access to previously unseen papers and also to unrecorded reminiscences by those who knew the writer well. In the light of these discoveries, a more raw, complex, twisted and brilliant Chandler emerges. (Kirkus UK)
