Raymond Chandler is well known for his novels featuring private detective Phillip Marlowe and for being a pioneer of film noir.

But it is less well known that he spent part of his early life living in Auckland Road, Upper Norwood.

The American born author moved to England when he was 12 and lived in a double fronted red-bricked villa with his mother, unmarried aunt and grandmother between 1901 and 1907.

And this morning an English Heritage blue plaque was unveiled at the house to mark the formative years, during which he excelled in classics at Dulwich College.

Dulwich College master Dr Joseph Spence said: “One of the things about Dulwich College of which I’m proudest is the way that, since the turn of the last century, it has produced exceptional novelists in every generation.

"Today we have the Booker Prize winning Michael Ondaatje and Graham Swift and the Booker-nominated Tom McCarthy and Tom Rob Smith.

"But at the top of the list stand PG Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler.

"They overlapped at the College for only one term, but they shared the benefits of a classical education that enabled each of them to manipulate the English language in such an interesting and compelling way.

"Chandler’s Philip Marlowe may speak with a Los Angeles accent, but his syntax owes more to Virgil and Livy than to any later writers.”

Chandler published his first novel The Big Sleep in 1939 and then wrote another seven internationally successful novels featuring detective Phillip Marlowe over the next 20 years including Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye.

During the 1940s several of Chandler’s novels were adapted into film, most famously The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.