Introduction. 'Where do you think I've been these last eight years?' He looked quite pleased with himself
'Where do you think I've been these last eight years?' He looked quite pleased with himself. 'Prison. Malloy's the name. Moose Malloy. The Great Bend bank job - that was me. On my own, too. Forty thousand dollars.' If anyone could rob a bank on his own, it's Moose Malloy. He's as hard as stone and as big as a bus. Now he's out of prison, and he wants two things: to know who gave his name to the police eight years ago, and to find his girlfriend. Moose means trouble, and it's the sort of trouble a private detective should stay away from. So of course Philip Marlowe runs straight into it: trouble with the police, trouble with women, trouble with almost every criminal in California... And trouble with murder. Even when he tries to walk away from it, this sort of trouble just follows him around... Raymond Chandler is one of the greatest modern detective writers. He turned the American crime story into a kind of art. He was born in 1888 in Chicago, Illinois, but was brought up and educated in England. He worked as a reporter in London before returning, in 1912, to the USA. After fighting in France during World War I, he lived and worked in California. He lost his job in 1932. Then he started to write crime stories for magazines. His first book, The Big Sleep (1939), was about a private detective, Philip Marlowe. It was a great success, and he wrote about Marlowe in many other books, including Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1944) and The Long Goodbye (1953). Many of his books have been made into successful films. Raymond Chandler died in 1959.
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