their wrongdoing. Police turn a blind eye to pornography and murder if they are paid well enough, putting profit and convenience above true justice. Newspapers present false information to the public. Marlowe himself feels that the law does not care about justice and finds that it is often easier to bend the rules if one wants to see justice served.

Edgar Allan Poe is credited with being  father of the detective mystery, but Arthur Conan Doyle elaborated on it with his Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. The typical English murder mystery had a small setting and limited number of characters who could be considered suspects. A good example is Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, in which all the suspects were confined to an island and the plot focused on discovering which one was guilty.

This kind of tight plot did not suit modern America because it is so big, so densely populated, and because so many people are newcomers, drifters, strangers, and eccentrics. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler both contributed to fashioning an American-style murder mystery which covered a broader canvas. Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, set in San Francisco, was still limited to a narrow setting because of the compact nature of the city. Sam Spade doesn't even drive a car. He rides a streetcar once or twice and takes a taxi on a couple of occasions. The number of possible suspects is limited because only a few know about the black bird.

Chancler writes about Los Angeles, an enormous city sprawling in every direction and dependent on automobiles. In the opening scenes he introduces two automobiles along with several important characters, including General Sternwood and the old man's two daughters.

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible.

The chauffeur is Owen Taylor. He will kill Arthur Gynnn Geiger that night. The Packard convertible belongs to Carmen Sternwood, and she will use it to drive to Geiger's bungalow in the Hollywood Hills. She would have no other way of getting there. When Marlowe follows the butler out to the greenhouse, he notices that

The boyish-looking chauffeur had a big black and chromium secdan out now and was dusting that.

This big Buick will end up in the ocean with Owen Taylor's body inside. Late in the story Marlowe is being tailed by a four-door Plymouth driven by Harry Jones. Chandler's plots are notoriously hard to follow, but they still feature a detective who is trying to solve a problem eventually involving several murders. First it is Geiger who gets shot. Then Owen Taylor dies in the Buick, and even Chandler couldn't explain whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Then Harry Jones is killed by Lash Canino with whisky containing cyanide. Later Marlowe kills Lash Canino outside Art Huck's garage.

But the real mystery is what happened to Rusty Regan. The General doesn't tell Marlowe  he wants him to find out where Rusty went, but Marlowe understands that this is the real problem, and he does some extracurricular investigation. Characteristically of the murder mystery genre, the story has a surprise ending. Rusty was murdered, and the perpetrator was none other than Carmen Sternwood.

The story covers a vast area and depends on cars. There are a number of kinky people involved because, after all, this is L.A. Geiger and his good friend Carol Lundgren are gay. Geiger rents pornographic books and uses exotic drugs. Chandler showed how the traditional English murder could morph into plots more suited to the modern world, in which anybody could be the victim and anybody could be the killer. Chandler also introduced American vernicular hardboiled poetry to detective fiction.

What is so interesting about this novel is the way that a new kind of detective hero is created who is shown to be so distinctly unlike previous detective heroes such as Sherlock Holmes. Philip Marlowe is described as a gritty, real and deeply flawed human individual, and the technique of having him as a first person narrator only serves to highlight this impression of his character and the extent to which he is such a departure from the stereotypical detective figure. Note, for example, how he describes himself in Chapter 1:

I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks and dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The attention to detail is interesting, particularly when it is accompanied by the phrase "I didn't care who knew it." This suggests that normally he would be bothered if he was viewed as "neat, clean, shaved and sober," which therefore indicates he is normally dishevelled, unshaven and drunk. As the novel progresses, the reader sees that he drinks during the day, he is sexually frustrated and he, at times, is happy to be violent towards women. Marlowe is therefore not presented as a force for good in the traditional way. By contrast, he is presented as an anti-hero, who tries to do good but at the same time reveals himself to be a deeply flawed character. He is presented as a kind of modern day knight doing his best to challenge injustice but aware of his own character failings. This is what makes this novel such a departure, in some ways, from the traditional genre of detective fiction.