I'll cop to not having read "The Meaning of Night," but I've read everything Raymond Chandler ever wrote, and I'm flummoxed as to how "a nasty ... antihero" could be thought to remotely resemble Chandler's "errant knight," Philip Marlowe.

But don't take my word for it -- read this description from Chandler's essay "The Secret Art of Murder":

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

I would say Chandler's Marlowe is rather the polar opposite of a "nasty antihero."

You should make it a point to read (or perhaps reread) some Chandler, Ms. Miller -- it's great stuff.

Nice review. One complaint:

It's unfortunate that people so often confuse Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett's laconic brute, with Chandler's eloquent, knightly Marlowe, just because Bogart played them both so memorably on screen; and worse that both get tarnished by the reputation of sadistic anti-hero Mike Hammer, just because Mickey Spillane's purple prose was imitative of Chandler's influential style. But read any of these masterpieces of American crime fiction back-to-back and you'll see that they're worlds apart. Marlowe, always putting himself in harms way for a principle (and getting beat up for it, badly), has more in common with American heroes Tom Joad or Spider-Man, than with other detectives, more competent or more corrupt, which is probably why so many of us are willing to rise up and defend his reputation after all these years.

Anti-hero. Sheesh.