Although Marlowe would have said that his principal hobby was replaying championship chess games taken from books, his greatest pleasure was solving murders and related crimes, since he worked for free as often as he did for money. As he told his old pal Lt. Bernie Ohls, Chief of homicide for the Los Angeles sherrif’s office. "I'm a romantic, Bernie. I hear voices crying in the night and I go to see what's the matter. You don't make a dime that way. . . .No percentage in it at all. No nothing, except sometimes I get my face pushed in, or get tossed in the can, or get threatened by some fast-money boy."

Marlowe 's romanticism stemmed in part from his desire to instill some humanity into the hard, fast superficial world of Hollywood and Los Angeles, where he lived and worked. Often he was tempted to go far beyond the extent of his responsibility to his clients, but almost invariably he held fast to his principles, and he was loyal to a fault.

In 1939 Marlowe did not reveal his knowledge of a murder’ s identity because she was insane and subject to epileptic seizures, and her discovery would have profited no one. Despite the fact that she had also tried to shoot him for refusing to have sex with her, Marlowe gave her sister a three-day grace period to get the girl to a hospital where she would be kept under constant observation , and where she might be cured. In 1944, pursuing a lead in a complicated set of murders arranged to look like a series of unrelated suicides, he was viciously beaten by corrupt policemen and sent to jail. When the police captain found out that his officers had punched and kicked Marlowe, had hit him with a blackjack, and had made him drink whiskey so they could arrest him for drunken driving, he asked if Mar- lowe wanted to file charges against them. Mar- lowe replied, "Life's too short for me to be filing charges of assault against police officers." Later, Marlowe discovered that the murderer he was looking for was Al Degarmo, the most corrupt of all the dirty cops. He told Degarmo shortly before the pinch, "I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long." In 1949 he was arrested twice and slapped around by the police in the process of shielding a movie star who was prepared to confess to a murder she hadn't committed. In 1953, protecting the memory of a friend he thought had died, Marlowe was again beaten by the police, sent to jail, and later set up as bait to trap a big-time racketeer who wanted Marlowe dead. In that same year, he received $5,000 from a would-be client, but refused to spend it because "there was something wrong with the way I got it."

Marlowe was threatened with jail, bodily harm, loss of his detective's license, and/or death in every major case he undertook. Yet, whether confronting crooked cops, petty thieves, junkies, syndicate hit-men, or clients who refused to save themselves, Marlowe endured, fending off guns and knives with sarcastic witticisms, keeping his head clear enough to have no illusions about himself or the people he dealt with, bearing no grudges, and demonstrating, when the occasion demanded, that he was a dead shot and a tough fighter.

Marlowe was more than simply a detective. He discussed T. S. Eliot with a mistress's chauffeur cited Flaubert's work habits to a popular hack writer, and quoted Browning to another mistress. When a woman with whom he had spent the night asked him, "How can such a hard man be so gentle?'' he replied, "If I wasn't hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I wasn't gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive.’

Although in 1939 Marlowe told Gen. Guy de Brisay Sternwood, "I'm unmarried because I don't like policemen's wives," he had numerous erotic encounters with women over the years. In 1939 he spent one night necking in his car parked high above the Pacific Ocean with Vivian Sternwood Regan, who wanted very much to sleep with him. When she found out he was playing along in order to pump her for information about a murder, she flew into a rage and had him drive her home. When he walked into his own apartment later that night, Vivian's sister Carmen was lying naked on his bed, giggling. In 1949 sweet young Orfamay Quest came all the way from Manhattan, Kans., to hire Marlowe to find her lost brother, Orrin. In the process of discovering that Orfamay had fingered Orrin so that a gangster could gun him down, Marlowe also learned that she was exceedingly easy to kiss. He later discovered that her sister Leila, a film star better known as Mavis Weld, was being blackmailed by Orrin, and that Mavis was even easier to kiss. And he found out that Mavis's roommate, a B-film actress named Dolores Gonzales, was as much fun to kiss as either of the Kansas girls and even more accessible.

In 1953, working on a double-barreled case which involved uncovering the truth about one disappearance and two apparently unrelated murders, Marlowe met Mrs. Linda Loring. Her sister was one of the two murder victims in this case. Linda was the daughter of a powerful multimillionaire and the wife of a physician whose specialty was prescribing uppers and downers for his high-society patients. Linda and Marlowe met over drinks a few times, and when she determined to divorce her husband, she spent a night in Marlowe's bed. When she left in the morning, Marlowe never expected to see her again. But his night with Linda was clearly more than just another trick to him, and he realized that to "say good-bye is to die a little."

In 1958, after a simple tailing job led Marlowe to discover both a murder and a murderer near Del Mar, Calif., he broke one of his unspoken rules. "When I want your beautiful body," he said to Betty Mayfield, "it won't be while you're my client." Minutes later she was saying, "Take me. I'm yours--all of me is yours. Take me." And he did. But when he returned home from Del Mar, he had a phone call from Paris, where Linda Loring had been living since their brief encounter. She told him she loved him and wanted to marry him, and--tacitly--he agreed. She invited him to come to Paris on her money, but Marlowe refused: "Sure, you have the money for 500 plane tickets. But this one will be my plane ticket. Take it or don't come." She accepted, and for Marlowe "the air was full of music."