Almost Philip Marlowe

This August 1953 issue of Verdict reprinted the Chandler story "Bay City Blues," originally published in the June 1938 Dime Detective. The detective here is Johnny Dalmas, one of several pulp P.I.s who later morphed into Philip Marlowe. This story, along with "No Crime in the Mountains" and the novelette "Lady in the Lake" were tossed into Chandler's fiction blender to create the 1943 novel Lady in the Lake.