After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. In 1950, Chandler described in a letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, why he began reading pulp magazines and later wrote for them: Chandler's first professional work, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot', was published in Black Mask magazine in 1933 his first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, featuring his famous Philip Marlowe detective character speaking in the first person. Due to his straitened financial circumstances during the Great Depression, Chandler turned to his latent writing talent to earn a living, teaching himself to write pulp fiction by studying the Perry Mason story formula of Erle Stanley Gardner.

Farewell my lovely 1940