A routine investigation of a diamond robbery involves an insurance detective in a bizarre case of murder, and cult worship.

Toby Stephens stars in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Raymond Chandler's second Philip Marlowe mystery.

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the '40s and '50s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily.

In Farewell My Lovely,

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Lew Archer knows he shouldn't have taken the case, but Alex Kincaid seemed so desperate. Kincaid's loving new bride Dolly has just inexplicably walked out on him, leaving Kincaid more than a little fearful for her sanity and her safety. So Archer reluctantly agreed to help Kincaid find his wife. But what he finds instead is enough to send a chill down anyone's spine—a new fresh corpse and evidence linking Dolly not only to this murder but to a series...

From the beginning, Jim Thompson knew he was going to catch hell no matter what he did. And during a childhood spent at the mercy of a father whose schemes put him on the wrong side of the law as often as the right, and a grandfather who knew the bad parts of town like the back of his hand, young Jim learned sin better than any writer had before. From his rabble-rousing adolescence in the American Midwest, to wasted teenage years in the seedy underbelly...

Celebrated private eye Lew Archer is hired by a father intent on preventing the marriage of his daughter to a penniless and possibly murderous artist. The chase takes Archer from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and from the San Francisco Bay area to Los Angeles as more than one murder crowds the investigation.

Luane Devore, a hated gossip, is murdered by one of her many enemies.

"On Valentine's Day, four members of the Coverdale family--George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles--were murdered in the space of 15 minutes. Their housekeeper, Eunice Parchman, shot them, one by one, in the blue light of a televised performance of Don Giovanni. When Detective Chief Superintendent William Vetch arrests Miss Parchman two weeks later, he discovers a second tragedy: the key to the Valentine's Day massacre hidden within a private humiliation...