Stalking the tawdry neon wilderness of forties and fifties Los Angeles, Raymond Chandler's hard-drinking, wise-cracking Phillip Marlowe is one of the world's most famous fictional detectives. «Playback» finds Marlowe mixing business with pleasure...
Three different persons all want to hire gay private detective Donald Strachey to prove that somebody other than they killed Paul Haig, the son of a rich, politically connected lush. The real fun begins when Strachey discovers that the common thread...
Alan Grant, Scotland Yard Inspector (who appears in five other novels by the same author) is confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg. Bored and restless, he becomes intrigued by a portrait of King Richard III brought to him by a friend. He...
Offered the chance to buy secrets from certain Chinese officials wishing to raise venture capital, the CIA's Hong Kong station chief, Ella Nidech, thrills to the opportunities now open to a well-trained, ambitious intelligence agent. Her...
A couple of missing wives — one a rich man's and one a poor man's — become the objects of Marlowe's investigation. One of them may have gotten a Mexican divorce and married a gigolo and the other may be dead. Marlowe's not sure he cares about...
Prefaced by the famous Atlantic Monthly essay of the same name, in which he argues the virtues of the hard-boiled detective novel, this collection mostly drawn from stories he wrote for the pulps demonstrates Chandler's imaginative, entertaining...