Why Marlowe is still the chief of detectives

from Spiked:

Although Chandler did not share the Red sympathies of Hammett (believing that there was ‘hardly a hair’s breadth’ between capitalism and communism), his novels assume that little is as it appears on the surface (something which always appealed to an old Marxist such as me), probing the conflicts between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, love and hate, passion and power that shape our lives.