Raymond Chandler in the context of Humphrey Bogart

William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːknər/; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature, often considered the greatest writer of Southern literature and regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century.

Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Later that decade, he wrote Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and The Wild Palms. He also worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. The former film, adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.

Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian author William Gibson. Set in a near-future dystopia, the narrative follows Case, a computer hacker enlisted into a crew by a powerful artificial intelligence and a traumatised former soldier to complete a high-stakes heist. It was Gibson's debut novel and, after its success, served as the first entry in the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

Gibson had primarily written countercultural short stories for science-fiction periodicals before Neuromancer. Influences on the novel include the detective stories of Raymond Chandler, the comic art of Jean Giraud, and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959). Neuromancer expanded and popularised the setting and concepts of an earlier Gibson story, "Burning Chrome" (1981), which introduced cyberspace—a digital space traversable by humans—and "jacking in", a bio-mechanical method of interfacing with computers.

James Scott Garner (né Bumgarner; April 7, 1928 – July 19, 2014) was an American actor. He played leading roles in more than 50 theatrical films, which included The Great Escape (1963) with Steve McQueen; Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (1964) with Julie Andrews; Cash McCall (1960) with Natalie Wood; The Wheeler Dealers (1963) with Lee Remick; Darby's Rangers (1958) with Stuart Whitman; Roald Dahl's 36 Hours (1965) with Eva Marie Saint; as a Formula 1 racing star in Grand Prix (1966); Raymond Chandler's Marlowe (1969) with Bruce Lee; Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) with Walter Brennan; Blake Edwards's Victor/Victoria (1982) with Julie Andrews; and Murphy's Romance (1985) with Sally Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He also starred in several television series, including popular roles such as Bret Maverick in the ABC 1950s Western series Maverick and as Jim Rockford in the NBC 1970s private detective show, The Rockford Files.

Garner's career and popularity continued into the 21st century with films such as Space Cowboys (2000) with Clint Eastwood; the animated film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) (voice work) with Michael J. Fox and Cree Summer; The Notebook (2004) with Gena Rowlands and Ryan Gosling; and in his TV sitcom role as Jim Egan in 8 Simple Rules (2003–2005).

The Long Goodbye is a 1973 American satirical neo-noir film directed by Robert Altman, adapted by Leigh Brackett from Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel of the same name. The film stars Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe along with Nina van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Henry Gibson, David Arkin, and Jim Bouton, and has an early, uncredited appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The story's setting was moved from the 1940s to 1970s Hollywood. The film has been called "a study of a moral and decent man cast adrift in a selfish, self-obsessed society where lives can be thrown away without a backward glance ... and any notions of friendship and loyalty are meaningless."

Laurel Canyon is a mountainous neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills region of the Santa Monica Mountains, within the Hollywood Hills West district of Los Angeles, California. The main thoroughfare of Laurel Canyon Boulevard connects the neighborhood with the more urbanized parts of Los Angeles to the north and south, between Ventura Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard.

Originally inhabited by the Tongva people, by the early 20th century real estate developers situated a vacation site along the slope of neighboring Lookout Mountain; this formed the nucleus of what would become the Laurel Canyon neighborhood. It later developed into a celebrity enclave: the remote, rugged nature of the land and its proximity to many of the movie studios in nearby Hollywood made it an ideal location for many movie stars to site their homes, especially during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Raymond Chandler's first novel The Big Sleep sets lurid scenes there, and in The Long Goodbye (1953), his private detective Philip Marlowe is residing in 'the Laurel Canyon district'.

Black Mask was a pulp magazine first published in April 1920 by the journalist H. L. Mencken and the drama critic George Jean Nathan. It is most well-known today for launching the hardboiled crime subgenre of mystery fiction, publishing now-classic works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, Paul Cain, Carroll John Daly, and others.

Sam Spade (Samuel Spade) is a fictional character and the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon. Spade also appeared in four lesser-known short stories by Hammett.

The Maltese Falcon, first published as a serial in the pulp magazine Black Mask, is the only full-length novel by Hammett in which Spade appears. The character, however, is widely cited as a crystallizing figure in the development of hard-boiled private detective fiction—Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, for instance, was strongly influenced by Spade.

Philip Marlowe (/ˈmɑːrloʊ/ MAR-loh) is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas", starting in 1933.

Some of those short stories were later combined and expanded into novels featuring Marlowe, a process Chandler called "cannibalizing", which is more commonly known in publishing as a fix-up. When the original stories were republished years later in the short-story collection The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler did not change the names of the protagonists to Philip Marlowe. His first two stories, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" and "Smart-Aleck Kill" (with a detective named Mallory), were never altered in print but did join the others as Marlowe cases for the television series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.

The Big Sleep is a 1946 American film noir directed by Howard Hawks. William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman co-wrote the screenplay, which adapts Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel. The film stars Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge in a story that begins with blackmail and leads to multiple murders.

Initially produced in late 1944, the film's release was delayed by more than a year because the studio wanted to release war films in anticipation of the end of World War II. A cut was released to servicemen overseas in 1945 shortly after its completion. During the delay, Bogart and Bacall married and Bacall was cast in Confidential Agent. When that movie failed, reshoots of The Big Sleep were done in early 1946 meant to take advantage of the public's fascination with "Bogie and Bacall".