BRIETMarketplace

It started with some business about a rare coin. Everybody knew who had stolen it, but nobody was anxious to do anything about it. Marlowe couldn’t understand why the old lady had hired him; she didn’t seem to like detectives and she didn’t want to tell him much. So he started to think about her, and then about the pale, fragile, frightened little girl who was her secretary, and then about her son_ which led him to the gambler, and then to the gambler’s luscious and lustful wife, and then to the elegant blackmailer. And so this case became a study of character, for even when murder was done, even after the second murder, character was the root of everything. Because he understood that, Marlowe went step by step to a solution of the case. Sardonic, quietly cynical, cold and merciless when he has to be, but gruffly compassionate toward the victims of evil, Marlowe steps out of these scintillating pages as one of the great detectives of modem murder-mystery fiction.