Which author created the detective Philip Marlowe?

Raymond Chandler, who came to fiction late - he had been an oil company executive and was sacked at 44 for drinking and absenteeism, then taught himself to write pulp stories in the depths of the Depression because he needed money.

What he did with the form was to make the prose the point. The plots are famously incoherent; when the film of The Big Sleep was being made, the screenwriters wired Chandler to ask who had killed the chauffeur and he replied that he had no idea. What holds it together is voice - the similes, the wisecracks, and a first-person narrator who is the only decent person in a corrupt city and is tired of it.

He also wrote the essay that defined the genre's ambitions, arguing that the detective story should take murder out of the drawing room and give it back to the people who actually commit it, and that down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. He then went to Hollywood, wrote Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder while loathing him, and produced one of the better lines about the place - that it had destroyed him as a writer and given him a swimming pool.