An early morning call to a dying millionaire sets private eye Philip Marlowe on the fast inside track of West Hollywood's hidden sewer of blackmail, menace and muscle. Neither of General Sternwood's daughters, it seems, is going to come up smelling of roses. Marlowe senses it is his job to protect the two women. But then he hadn't considered himself becoming part of the wholesale nastiness of it all ... Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Philip Marlowe stalked the tawdry neon wilderness of southern California. There Raymond Chandler's creation became the most famous fictional detective since Sherlock Holmes, often imitated, never bettered.