Big sleep

'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.

' Los Angeles Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is blackmailing him.

A broken, weary old man, Sternwood just wants Marlowe to make the problem go away.

However, with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out.

And that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

The Big Sleep is Raymond Chandler's first novel featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe.

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times 'Chandler grips the mind from the first sentence' Daily Telegraph 'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times 'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess Discover the newest addition to the inimitable Philip Marlowe series - Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne - out 6 September 2018 in hardback and ebook from Hogarth.