Fans of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer may want to look away now because Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is the iconic private eye. Denise Mina is the latest author – following Robert B. Parker and Benjamin Black, among others – to write a Philip Marlowe novel. The Second Murderer (Harvill Secker, £18.99) opens with a nod to The Big Sleep as Marlowe is summoned to the Beverly Hills mansion of the dying Chadwick Montgomery and commissioned to discover the whereabouts of Montgomery’s missing daughter, Christine. There are a number of wrinkles, though: Chadwick Montgomery is a...