Philip Marlowe

Philip Marlowe
Philip Marlowe character
Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe, with Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge in The Big Sleep
First appearance	Finger Man (short story) The Big Sleep (novel)
Last appearance	The Pencil (short story) Poodle Springs (novel)
Created by	Raymond Chandler
Portrayed by	Dick Powell (film, radio, TV) Humphrey Bogart (film) Van Heflin (radio) Robert Montgomery (film, radio) George Montgomery (film) Gerald Mohr (radio) Philip Carey (TV) James Garner (film) Elliott Gould (film) Robert Mitchum (film) Ed Bishop (BBC radio) Powers Boothe (TV) Danny Glover (TV) James Caan (HBO film) Jason O'Mara (TV pilot) Toby Stephens (BBC radio)
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Private detective
Nationality	American

Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas".

Some of those short stories were later combined and expanded into novels featuring Marlowe, a process Chandler called "cannibalizing" but is more commonly known in publishing as a fixup. When the non-cannibalized stories were republished years later in the short story collection The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler changed the names of the protagonists to Philip Marlowe. His first two stories, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot" and "Smart-Aleck Kill" (with a detective named Mallory), were never altered in print but did join the others as Marlowe cases for the television series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.

Marlowe's character is foremost within the genre of hardboiled crime fiction that originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared.

Underneath the wisecracking, hard-drinking, tough private eye, Marlowe is quietly contemplative and philosophical and enjoys chess and poetry. While he is not afraid to risk physical harm, he does not dish out violence merely to settle scores. Morally upright, he is not fooled by the genre's usual femmes fatales, such as Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep.