Toby Stephens stars in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatization of Raymond Chandler’s last Philip Marlowe mystery and first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 22 October 2011.Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the 40s and 50s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retail his integrity amid the corruption he encounters daily.In Poodle Springs, Marlowe is fresh from his honeymoon with heiress Linda Loring, and living a life of idle leisure in the upmarket Californian town of the title. But being a kept man soon loses its charm and, bored and restless, Marlowe sets up shop as an investigator once more. Hired by a local criminal to find a gambler on the run from his debts, he is sucked into a world of bigamy, blackmail, and murderThe eighth and final Philip Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs was unfinished at the time of Raymond Chandler s death in 1959. It remained so for another thirty years, until crime writer Robert B. Parker completed the novel to mark the centenary of Chandler’s birth. Starring Toby Stephens, this entertaining dramatization by Robin Brooks retains all the pace and intrigue of the original book.