Which novelist created private detective Philip Marlowe?

Raymond Chandler created the private detective Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe is a Los Angeles-based investigator and the signature character of Chandler’s hard-boiled crime fiction. He first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939, and later returned in novels including Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, and The Long Goodbye.

A common mix-up is confusing Marlowe with Dashiell Hammett’s detectives, especially Sam Spade and the Continental Op. Chandler’s early pulp stories featured prototype detectives such as Carmady and John Dalmas; he later reshaped material from some of those stories into Marlowe novels.

Marlowe also became strongly associated with film noir through Humphrey Bogart’s performance in the 1946 film adaptation of The Big Sleep. Other actors, including Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and Elliott Gould, have played him in later adaptations.