Publisher's Synopsis
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler in a series of novels including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Marlowe first appeared, under that name, in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured essentially identical characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas." Some of those short stories were later combined and expanded into novels featuring Marlowe, a process Chandler called "cannibalizing." When the non-cannibalized stories were republished years later in the short story collection The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler changed the names of the protagonists to Philip Marlowe. Chandler's final Marlowe short story. It later provided the basis of an episode for an HBO mini-series (1983-86) entitled Philip Marlowe, Private Detective and starring Powers Boothe as Marlowe.
