There was a stifling scent of summer on the Pasadena morning when he first called on Mrs Elizabeth Bright Murdock. Later Marlowe couldn't work out which was worse: air you couldn't breathe, or a client who didn't tell you the story. The job was to find a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband's collection. Easy. Probably too easy. Each time the Doubloon pops up, so does a murder. Soon Marlowe's got a full-scale tragedy on his hands...
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Philip Marlowe stalked the tawdry neon wilderness of Southern California. There Raymond Chandler's creation became the most famous fictional detective since Sherlock Holmes; often imitated, never bettered. Read the complete Marlowe novels in Penguin paperback.