Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old
man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze
by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But
with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy
backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out - and that's before he
stumbles over the first corpse.
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to England with
his family when he was 12. He attended Dulwich College, Alma Mater to
some of the 20th century's most renowned writers. Returning to America
in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later
married.
It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to
writing and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine
Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later by his first novel. The
Big Sleep introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the often imitated
but never-bettered hard-boiled private investigator. It is in Marlowe's
long shadow that every fictional detective must stand - and under the
influence of Raymond Chandler's addictive prose that every crime author
must write.
