Sam Marlowe Private Eye

Was Samuel Marlowe, the inspiration for author Raymond Chandler's famed fictional character Philip Marlowe, who's been played in film adaptations, by several actors over the decades, from Humphrey Bogart to Robert Mitchum?

Marlowe, is alleged to be LA's first licensed black private detective. He shadowed lives, took care of secrets, and knew his way around Tinseltown. He helped Hollywood figures out of jams in the off-limits African-American clubs and bars in LA that many white actors and execs enjoyed frequenting on the sly.

Marlowe was supposedly called on to help stars like Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin track down runaway lovers, and was tapped to keep an eye on a $8,000 blackmail payment Marlene Deitrich's studio made to the son of her female makeup artist she was in a relationship with.

It's said he also knew hard-boiled writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Marlowe first connected with Dashiell Hammett in 1929, the same year Hammett published his first novel 'Red Harvest'.

Marlowe wrote a letter to Hammett to complain about details of his portrayals of private investigators and the two supposedly became friends; with Marlowe eventually sharing real-life details that would show up in Hammett's later books.

According to research and an LA Times article, in 1930 when Hammett published 'The Maltese Falcon', the "Sam Spade" character was a private nod to Marlowe's help. And the character’s surname was Hammett’s “winking inside joke,” because “spade” was a derogatory term for a black person.

Marlowe also helped out Raymond Chandler too by not only sharing his real-life expertise and tracking down police files, but also escorting the writer around the seedier parts of LA where it was difficult for whites to navigate because of the strict segregation at the time.

So his name was Samuel Marlowe … and the writers most famous characters were Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

Samuel Benjamin Marlowe, Sr., was born on August 3, 1890, in Montego Bay, Jamaica. According to The Times obituary, he served in Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, a World War I fighting brigade that guarded the Suez Canal. After the war, Marlowe immigrated to the United States settling in Los Angeles, where he soon became a private detective.

According to a 1980s story in the Sentinel it asserted: When Marlowe became a PI in 1921, he was the “first black man to have a licensed detective agency (Samuel B. Marlowe Detective Agency) in the state of California.”

The California Department of Consumer Affairs, which issues private detective licenses, has no record of Marlowe, but an agency spokesman said that older files are often incomplete or missing. The University of Southern California's History Department researcher Angelica Stoddard, whose work centers on L.A.’s first licensed black private eyes, says Marlowe is the earliest one she’s heard of.

The private eye died two weeks before his 101st birthday in 1991. He’s buried at the Inglewood Park Cemetery.

Sources: LA Times: Finding Marlowe article written by Daniel Miller (Nov. 2014); Shadow and Act (April 2017); theculturegeistblogspot (Dec. 2014)