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Philip Marlowe

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fictional character created by Raymond Chandler

Key facts

First appearance
" Finger Man " (short story), The Big Sleep (novel)
Last appearance
" The Pencil " (short story), Poodle Springs (unfinished novel, completed by Robert B. Parker )
Created by
Raymond Chandler
Gender
Male
Occupation
Private detective
Nationality
American

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Given name
Philip
Gender
male
Citizenship
United States
Place of birth
Santa Rosa
Occupation
chess player
Languages spoken
English language
Performer
Liam Neeson
Sport
chess
Image
The-Big-Sleep-trailer-book.jpg
Height
6
Show 3 more facts
medical condition
tobacco use disorder
Commons category
Philip Marlowe
present in work
The Big Sleep
Sources (3)

via Wikidata · CC0

~16 min read

Encyclopedic overview

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).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Philip Marlowe” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.