Raymond Chandler – quiz

Seventy-five years after Philip Marlowe stepped out for the first time in The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private detective is as sharp as ever. But have you solved the mystery of his enduring appeal? Test your knowledge of his life and work with our quiz

The writer Raymond Chandler

Put that in your pipe ... the writer Raymond Chandler. Photograph: Ralph Crane/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

  1. 1. Which poet famously said of Chandler's "powerful but extremely depressing books" that they "should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art"?

  2. 2. Between 1900 and 1905 Chandler was a pupil at which English school?

  3. 3. In The Big Sleep, what kind of shop is Geiger's pornography racket disguised as?

  4. 4. Which publication infuriated Chandler by declaring Philip Marlowe "amoral"?

  5. 5. According to Chandler, all writing "that has any life" takes time to create because it is done using a particular part of the body. But which one?

  6. 6. In which essay did Chandler attack detective fiction that primarily seeks to create puzzles ("assembling an eggbeater")?

  7. 7. Who directed a 1978 film version of The Big Sleep which was set in England, rather than Cailfornia?

  8. 8. To which play by Shakespeare does Marlowe allude in the final lines of Farewell, My Lovely?

  9. 9. What was Chandler's first published story?

  10. 10. According to Chandler, plausibility is largely a matter of what?

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