Raymond Chandler given blue plaque in mean streets of Upper Norwood

Creator of hard-boiled LA detective Philip Marlowe lived in leafy London suburb while a pupil at nearby Dulwich College

• Maev Kennedy - The Guardian, Tuesday 7 October 2014 

Humphrey Bogart, as Philip Marlowe, and Lauren Bacall in the film version of Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Photograph: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

Down those not very mean streets of Dulwich and Upper Norwood a man must go, to see a new English Heritage blue plaque honouring one of the most improbable residents of the leafy and affluent south London suburbs: Raymond Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe, the 10-minute egg of the world of hard-boiled detectives.
The clue was in the name: while the rumpled, hungover but noble detective would have looked, as Chandler wrote in Farewell, My Lovely, “about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food” in Edwardian Norwood, he was christened Marlowe in honour of Chandler’s house at his old school, Dulwich College.

Raymond Chandler blue plaque Photograph: PR

The author of Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, and The Long Goodbye, whose detective hero was immortalised on screen by Humphrey Bogart, later stayed at more obviously Chandleresque locations including the Connaught and the Ritz. The plaque, however, has been unveiled on a house at Auckland Road, Upper Norwood, a double-fronted Victorian villa that became the London home where he lived longest, from 1900 to 1905, while he was a day student at the college preparing for his civil service exams.
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