Detective novelist Philip Marlow suffers from the crippling condition psoriatic arthropathy. Incapacitated both physically and emotionally whilst confined to a hospital bed, Marlow escapes into his imagination, plotting out a murder tale in which he is both a big-band singer and a private eye. As he re-writes his early crime noir thriller, The Singing Detective, he enters into a surreal Chandleresque fantasy of sleazy nightclubs, spies and criminals.
In his hospital bed where he rants and yells at everyone who comes near him, Marlow begins to hallucinate from his high fever. Reality and fantasy constantly overlap and intertwine as the story weaves effortlessly between his present experiences, his past fictions, paranoid imaginings, and the overwhelming memories that still dominate his life from his childhood, growing up amongst a poor, ignorant coal-mining family in the Forest of Dean.
Escaping into this dark inner world, he places himself in the role of the hero of his own novel, and so begins to encounter and explore the guilt he has carried from his tormented childhood days, and the paranoid fantasies he has about his estranged wife Nicola. As he drifts between memories of past events and the mental re-working of his novel, all surfacing in his subconscious, Marlow's tortuous self-analytical voyage of personal discovery provides a key to the conquering of his illness.
A dramatically rich and complex masterpiece, disturbing and shocking, yet also with great depth of insight and humour – a uniquely brilliant work.
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