In Raymond Chandler’s 1940 detective novel, “Farewell, My Lovely,” he took the measure of a rogue cop named Blane in a typical flight of literary fancy: “He was a windblown blossom of some 200 pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker.” Blane, of course, is not the character Chandler’s fans remember best. That honor goes to his suave but “shop-soiled” Los Angeles gumshoe, Philip Marlowe.

Marlowe first appeared on film in 1944, in “Murder, My Sweet,” starring Dick Powell; but when Humphrey Bogart played him in 1946 in “The Big Sleep,” adapted from Chandler’s first novel (written when he was 50), Marlowe became a star. He’s likely the reason Chandler himself will get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015, joining a scant sprinkling of authors (Dr. Seuss, Ray Bradbury, Ogden Nash) admitted to the constellation of movieland greats. Though a half-dozen actors portrayed Marlowe on screen, a new biography, “The World of Raymond Chandler,” edited by Barry Day, suggests that Chandler’s performance of the character in real life rivals any other, since he created the hard-drinking, self-deprecating antihero in his own image.

Chandler did not invent the private eye — Dashiell Hammett and a few others got there first. But his vision is the one that caught the public eye and stuck most indelibly in the imagination, like — in one of his aromatic metaphors — “a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

Chandler had envisioned Cary Grant in the Marlowe role. “I like people with manners, grace, some social intuition, an education slightly above the Reader’s Digest fan,” he wrote in a letter to the thriller writer George Harmon Coxe. He wanted his cinematic alter-ego to project those values, but to also be a “common man” who didn’t put on airs. In a letter to the movie producer John Houseman, he explained: “Marlowe is a more honorable man than you and I. I don’t mean Bogart playing Marlowe and I don’t mean because I created him.” All the same, he wrote in still another letter, Bogart was “the genuine article,” someone who could be “tough without a gun,” and had “a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt.”