Hard-boiled detective fiction at its best: Raymond Chandler's best loved novel, The Big Sleep, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 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 PI). Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is indulging in some petty blackmail. A weary, old man, Sternwood just wants the problem to go away. But Marlowe finds he has his work cut out just keeping Sternwood's wild, devil-may-care daughters out of trouble as they prowl LA's dirtiest and darkest streets. And pretty soon, he's up to his neck in hoodlums and corpses...

The Penguin Active Reading range is carefully graded into 5 levels from starter to intermediate. The text is simplified and exercises develop the four language skills — reading, writing, listening and speaking. The accompanying multi-rom contains a recording of the full simplified text and a range of interactive exercises linked to the text. Ideal for all English Language students.

Detective Philip Marlowe is looking for Derace Kingsley's wife, Crystal. Is she dead or not? Marlowe finds more than one dead body and learns about women, drugs, men in love, and a police cover-up, Who killed The Lady in the Lake and why? Penguin Readers are simplified texts which provide a step-by-step approach to the joys of reading for pleasure.

'I pushed her back into the house without saying anything, shut the door. We stood looking at each other inside. She dropped her hand slowly and tried to smile. Then all expression went out of her white face and it looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box... I lit my cigarette, puffed it slowly for a moment and then asked: What are you doing here? Before creating Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler perfected the hardboiled private detective story in the pages of Blask Mask magazine — tough, spare tales of gumshoes and murder, laced with a weary lyricism and deadpan, laconic wit. Killer in the Rain is vintage Chandler, the groundwork for his classic first novel The Big Sleep.

Eight years ago Moose Malloy and cute little redhead Velma were getting married — until someone framed Malloy for armed robbery. Now his stretch is up and he wants Velma back. PI Philip Marlow meets Malloy one hot day in Hollywood and, out of the generosity of his jaded heart, agrees to help him. Dragged from one smoky bar to another, Marlowe's search for Velma turns up plenty of dangerous gangsters with a nasty habit of shooting first and talking later. And soon what started as a search for a missing person becomes a matter of life and death...

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 gets cops' noses out of joint. If Marlowe doesn't wrap this one up fast, he's going to end up in jail — or worse, in a box in the ground...

In the four long stories in this collection, Marlowe is hired to protect a rich old guy from a gold digger, runs afoul of crooked politicos, gets a line on some stolen jewels with a reward attached, and stumbles across a murder victim who may have been an extortionist.