Kindle. And yet more mid-century hard-boiled noir pulp. This one is quite good in many ways: Marlowe nailed the character of his first-person narrator with a decent backstory, plausible psychology, cold-blooded calculation and competency, and as such he functions somewhat as a prototype for James Caan's character in Thief (1981). I found him hard to hate due to his soft spot for animals. The other characters are not drawn as well, often merely archetypes or worse. The two women, one a cool and incoherent blonde who seems to cop it from everyone, the other a very forgiving keeper fond of the horses, fare poorly but have more shape than the deputy sheriff. Most of the action takes place in Hudson, Florida (on the west coast/Gulf of Mexico side of the Florida Peninsula, now the northern reaches of Tampa suburbia) which could've used a few more locals. The structure mostly works but is sometimes stitched together with explicit binaries that were not exhaustive or convincing. Marlowe is coy about the sexy bits but it works in that a-gentleman-never-tells mode of telling. I wonder why they didn't make this into a movie.
The edition I have had an introduction by Charles Kelly which was unusually valuable and worth reading ahead of the main course. Kelly wrote a biography of Marlowe; here's a grab at the L.A. Review of Books (2012).
