The hard-boiled world of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s iconic private eye, comes to vivid life in this brilliant graphic novel adaptation of the classic noir tale. In 1940s Los Angeles, a sour-faced millionaire hires Philip Marlowe, a hard-boiled, harder-drinking detective, to scare off a suspected gold digger who has got her claws into his even wealthier stepson. Marlowe takes the case but quickly discovers that Harriett Huntress isn’t just after she’s playing a long, cold game of revenge… Marlowe forms an alliance with George, the client's chauffeur-cum-bodyguard-cum-fixer. George is a black, Dartmouth educated veteran with a sniper’s skills and his own agenda, and the two uneasy allies find themselves on the wrong end of a brace of hired killers and an enigmatic casino boss. . . It rapidly becomes clear that Marlowe, sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, is just asking for trouble. But that’s the thing. Trouble is his business.
Authors
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the 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 just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been realized 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 March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and 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. Chandler's Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, are considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery".
