Philip Marlowe

Philip Marlowe (/ˈmɑːrloʊ/ MAR-loh) is a fictional private detective created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Though Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep (1939), Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective since 1933, starred various prototype detectives with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas."

Several of the aforementioned short stories, when republished in the collection The Simple Art of Murder (1950), changed the names of the protagonists to Philip Marlowe (these are not to be confused with the stories Chandler directly combined and expanded – "cannibalized" – into Marlowe novels, which were generally blocked from any republication during his lifetime, and saw no text alterations in later republications).