Marlowe is, of course, the most famous creation of Raymond Chandler, perhaps the most famous of American crime novelists. On the one hand, there is his glorious writing, his blue-collar heroes and the occasional profound observations about the human experience. It takes a strong stomach to read a story in which a woman needs a slap to calm her down. Crime fiction was, and is, anti-feminist. Chandler may have been a misogynist, but he definitely lived in misogynist times, and his fiction reflects that.

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