There was a stifling scent of summer on the Pasadena morning when he first called on Mrs Elizabeth Bright Murdock. Later Marlowe couldn't work out which was worse: air you couldn't breathe, or a client who didn't tell you the story. The job was to find a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband's collection. Easy. Probably too easy. Each time the Doubloon pops up, so does a murder. Soon Marlowe's got a full-scale tragedy on his hands. . . Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Philip Marlowe stalked the tawdry neon wilderness of Southern California. There Raymond Chandler's creation became the most famous fictional detective since Sherlock Holmes; often imitated, never bettered. Read the complete Marlowe novels in Penguin paperback.