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Raymond Chandler was a poet disguised as a pulp novelist. He didn’t invent the image of the hard-boiled detective but the quality of his writing about cynical, honourable Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe made it timeless. Writers from Michael Connelly to Ian Rankin are in his debt, thanks to passages like this, from (1940): “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.” ◖