Discover the new Penguin Crime and Espionage series

For wise-cracking Private Eye Philip Marlowe, murder is all in a day's work...

There are no streets meaner than those of L.A.'s underworld - but luckily one detective has more than his fair share of street smarts. Here, in the first two novels featuring the immortal creation Philip Marlowe, we see the cynical sleuth taking on a nasty case of blackmail involving a Californian millionaire and his two devil-may-care daughters; then dealing with a missing nightclub crooner (plus several gangsters with a habit of shooting first and talking later).

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but moved to England with his family when he was twelve. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California. 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, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler died in 1959.