Classic Chandler

BBC Radio 4 presents dramatisations of all Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, with Toby Stephens playing Philip Marlowe throughout.

Philip Marlowe is a moral man in an amoral world. California in the 1940s and 1950s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the American Dream.

The police are corrupt, the businessmen well-heeled racketeers with politicians in their pockets and their daughters have gone to the bad.

The taxi-drivers, maids and bartenders restore Marlowe's faith in human nature - scratching out a living at the bottom of the pile, Marlowe is there with them, in his shabby office with its cracked sign and no air-con, waiting for the next client to walk through the door.

Alison Hindell, Head of Audio Drama, says: "Classic Chandler is collectors' stuff. The Philip Marlowe stories cover the full range of Chandler's characters including some very tricky women; the crystalline sense of period and place; the plots - byzantine with their twists and turns, seductions and knock-out punches: all are presented together for the first time as a complete set.

Add to that the superbly focussed scripts by Robin Brooks and Stephen Wyatt along with Toby Stephens's sharp interpretation of Marlowe and the result is a memorable experience. And in addition, I found that, although the mood and the tone are definitely noir, the imagination is fired into full colour by these productions. The power of radio."