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Some questions you don't even have to think about to know the answer: Philip Marlowe, without a shadow of a doubt. Because for $25 a day plus expenses I'd get access to one of the finest internal monologues known to man, a three-line description that would sum me up to a tee, and while justice, in the end, would inevitably fail to be done on some level, it would fail to be done so fantastically that I wouldn't even care.

You don't go to Marlowe for a neat resolution with all the ends tied up in a pretty little bow: you don't go to him if you want to see the villain of the piece neatly tidied away, either by being tossed into a cell in San Quentin or courtesy of a convenient murder. Chances are, if you go to Marlowe, there is no obvious villain of the piece, nobody you can point the finger at and remove from the equation and after that everything in the garden will be lovely. There are bad guys and there are worse guys, on both sides of the law. You go to him because no matter how long it takes him to get there or how unlikely a path he treads to end up there, Marlowe always gets to the bottom of things. Even if you lose interest. Even if in the end you'd rather he didn't, even if some of the uncomfortable secrets he dredges out into the open are your own. I might not get the answer I wanted, but I'd be sure to get an answer.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean justice. He's seldom in a position to do anything about it, but he gets the truth all the same.

You don't go to Marlowe to see justice done. You get your answer, and often that's all you get.

There are, of course, supplementary benefits. If I actually went to engage Marlowe to look into something for me, chances are that no matter how old or dowdy or uninteresting I at first appeared to be I would, in one way or another, end up being a femme fatale. Even if I pitched up in rimless glasses and a hat that had been taken from its mother too young.

There's also the small fact that should things come to such a pass that I ended up dead - and this is often an occupational hazard for a character in a crime novel - it wouldn't just be because I was a dame in the pulps and ending up dead's just what happens. While the body count in the Marlowe novels is often nothing short of spectacular, Chandler is at least an equal-opportunities offender. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, your body's just as likely to hit the floor, and the murder methods are usually remarkably non-gendered. Women in the Chandler novels often meet grisly ends, but not noticeably more often than the men do, and not in noticeably different ways. People get shot, they get stabbed, they get discovered with ice-picks in the backs of their necks - and at least if I ended up dead in a Chandler novel, chances are I would have been doing something to deserve it. People in Chandler novels don't just die for no reason, or because there's yet another homicidal rapist on the loose who fuckin' loves eliminating. There's usually an actual motive, and usually it actually makes sense.

Compare this to modern detective fiction, in which women are murdered far more often than men, usually for no more reason than they were female in front of the novel's resident Serial Maniac. Often their deaths are protracted, gruesome and extremely humiliating; often they contain some element of sexual violence. Does nobody do normal murder any more?

Give me the choice between that and a bullet to the brain, and I know which I'd pick. The end result's the same, and being shot's so much quicker.

The other positive about being the murderee in a Marlowe novel is that my death wouldn't just be a means by which he - the detective and thus the main character - could flaunt his own angst and unfinished business with the resident Big Bad. Detective novels these days are often considered to be no good unless things Get Personal for our intrepid investigator. The victims, no matter how hideous their deaths or how much the detective emotes over them - usually because their murders dredge up some hideous Moment from the investigator's Tragic Backstory, not because they just feel sorry for the poor bastard who was slowly tortured to death - are little more than a means to an end. Nobody, ultimately, would much care what had happened to me or how much I had suffered because I Wasn't The Main Character. My death and the cause of it would just be set dressing for the awesomely significant drama that was Sexy Investigator X's angst-ridden private life.

Marlowe wouldn't wave his angst in anyone's face or complain about his own existential torment, or spend half the book hamstrung over his beautiful wife's unsolved murder, committed a decade previously. He wouldn't have ridiculous and poorly-justified personality conflicts with a colleague or only really start giving a damn when the Big Bad came after him. He'd just get on with the job that needed to be done.

I'd also be getting help from an investigator, not a pathologist or a criminal psychologist, or a journalist or a forensic scientist or a bloodstain analyst. Call me old-fashioned, but I can't help thinking some things are best done by actual detectives.