‘He lay crumpled on his back. Very lonely, very dead. The safe door was wide open. A metal drawer was pulled out. It was empty now. There may have been money in it once.’
Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe’s on a case: his client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband’s collection. That’s the simple part. It becomes more complicated when Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead.
That’s also unlucky for a private investigator, because leaving a trail of corpses around LA puts cops’ noses seriously out of joint. If Marlowe doesn’t wrap this one up fast, he’s going to end up either in jail or in a wooden box in the ground . . .
Down These Mean Streets
Chandler himself defined literature as ‘any sort of writing that generates its own heat’, which fairly describes his own best work. No other crime writer could work the same narcotic chemistry in...
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