Chandler's treatment of the detective novel exhibits an effort to develop the form.

Morally upright, he is not fooled by the genre's usual femmes fatales, such as Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. While he is not afraid to risk physical harm, he does not dish out violence merely to settle scores.

Underneath the wisecracking, hard-drinking, tough private eye, Marlowe is quietly contemplative, philosophical and enjoys chess and poetry. His first two stories, 'Blackmailers Don't Shoot' and 'Smart-Aleck Kill' (with a detective named Mallory), were never altered in print but did join the others as Marlowe cases for the television series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. When the original stories were republished years later in the short-story collection The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler did not change the names of the protagonists to Philip Marlowe. Some of those short stories were later combined and expanded into novels featuring Marlowe, a process Chandler called ' cannibalizing', which is more commonly known in publishing as a fix-up. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like 'Carmady' and 'John Dalmas', starting in 1933. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939.

The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Philip Marlowe ( / ˈ m ɑːr l oʊ/) is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre.

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