Chandler: The writer in the Waterford Quaker

A Mysterious Something in the Light: Raymond Chandler, A Life

The crime writer Raymond Chandler’s mother, Florence Thornton, was born in Waterford in 1861. She fled there when her marriage in the United States disintegrated, arriving with her son, Ray in

1900. It was a strange sanctuary, as detailed in Tom Williams’s fascinating biography of Chandler, A Mysterious Something in the Light.