Hachette India

The Philip Marlowe Omnibus (3-books-in-1)

Raymond Chandler

Meet Philip Marlowe

These three classic novels featuring private eye Philip Marlowe are not just the best of Raymond Chandler but among the best works epitomizing America's hard-boiled school of crime fiction.

The Big Sleep was an instant sensation when first published in 1939. It centres around a paralyzed California millionaire with two psychopathic daughters; he involves Marlowe in a case of blackmail that turns into murder.

Farewell My Lovely, which Chandler regarded as his finest work, came out the following year. It has Marlowe dealing with the Los Angeles gambling circuit, a murder he stumbles upon, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women.

The Long Goodbye was his sixth novel featuring Philip Marlowe which won the 1955, Edgar Award for Best Novel. This novel sees Marlowe standing up for a down and out friend Terry Lennox, a war veteran. He persists in investigating the case on his own, despite being warned off by the police, a bullying mobster, and Terry's immensely rich and influential newspaper baron father-in-law.

"Chandler writes like a slumming angel and invests the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence." Ross Macdonald.

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at 44, Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot', was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on 26 March 1959, in La Jolla, California.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by many to be synonymous with "private detective", both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, the quintessential hard boiled private eye.