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Poodle Springs

Poodle Springs

Summary

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the ’40s and ’50s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily. In Poodle Springs, Marlowe is fresh from his honeymoon with heiress Linda Loring, and living a life of idle leisure in the upmarket Californian town of the title. But being a kept man soon loses its charm and, bored and restless, Marlowe sets up shop as an investigator once more. Hired by a local criminal to find a gambler on the run from his debts, he is sucked into a world of bigamy, blackmail and murder... The eighth and final Philip Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs was unfinished at the time of Raymond Chandler’s death in 1959. It remained so for another 30 years, until crime writer Robert B. Parker completed the novel to mark the centenary of Chandler’s birth. Starring Toby Stephens, this entertaining dramatisation by Robin Brooks retains all the pace and intrigue of the original book.

About the authors

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888, but moved to England with his family when he was twelve, where he attended Dulwich College, alma mater to some of the twentieth century's most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep. Chandler died in 1959, having established himself as the finest crime writer in America.
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Robert B Parker

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