In The Simple Act of Murder (1935) Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), one of America's premier hard-boiled novelists, wrote of his detective hero, Philip Marlowe, " … down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything." Unlike James M. Cain and other hard-boiled novelists of his time, Chandler was a romantic whose famous detective was a knight in slightly battered armor. Marlowe appears in Chandler's four most famous novels, The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953) as well as several lesser known works. Philip Marlowe was a character made for Hollywood: street smart, wise cracking but ultimately an honorable man—a prototype for the American detective hero ever since. Several of Chandler's...