Product Description

Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he's never herd of to tail a gorgeous redhead, but decides he prefers to help out the redhead. She's been acquitted of her alcoholic husband's murder, but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court's word for it.

"Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence:" -- Ross Macdonald

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #406104 in Books
• Published on: 1988-08-12
• Released on: 1988-08-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Library Journal
Chandler is not only the best writer of hardboiled PI stories, he's one of the 20th century's top scribes, period. His full canon of novels and short stories is reprinted in trade paper featuring uniform covers in Black Lizard's signature style. A handsome set for a reasonable price.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Raymond Chandler is a master." --The New York Times

“[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.” --The New Yorker

“Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.” --Robert B. Parker, The New York Times Book Review

“Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye.” --Los Angeles Times

“Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.” —The Boston Book Review

“Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century. . . . Age does not wither Chandler’s prose. . . . He wrote like an angel.” --Literary Review

“[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision.” --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.” —Ross Macdonald

“Raymond Chandler is a star of the first magnitude.” --Erle Stanley Gardner

“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.” --Paul Auster

“[Chandler]’s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that’s like ours, but isn’t. ” --Carolyn See

Download Description
Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he's never heard of to tail a gorgeous redhead, but decides he prefers to help out the redhead. She's been acquitted of her alcoholic husband's murder, but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court's word for it.

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"Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence."
   ROSS MACDONALD

"Raymond Chandler is a master."
   THE NEW YORK TIMES

"[Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered."
   THE NEW YORKER

"Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious."
   ROBERT B. PARKER, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"Philip Marlowe remains the quintessential urban private eye."
   LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner.... An original.... A great artist."
   THE BOSTON BOOK REVIEW

"Raymond Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century.... Age does not wither Chandler's prose.... He wrote like an angel."
   LITERARY REVIEW

"[T]he prose rises to heights of unselfconscious eloquence, and we realize with a jolt of excitement that we are in the presence of not a mere action tale teller, but a stylist, a writer with a vision."
   JOYCE CAROL OATES, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence."
   ROSS MACDONALD

"Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since."
   PAUL AUSTER

"[Chandler]'s the perfect novelist for our times. He takes us into a different world, a world that's like ours, but isn't. "
   CAROLYN SEE

"A serious rereading of the Marlowe novels and stories yields more surprises than a rereading of Hemingway."
   RICHARD RUSSO, AUTHOR OF EMPIRE FALLS

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Customer Reviews

Marlowe's Last Stand
This was Raymond Chandler's last novel, published before he died. It doesn't seem quite up to his earlier books. This novel is shorter in length and less rich in details about the rich and corrupt. Chandler had worked for years as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. His drinking may have flushed away his talents. This 1958 story does not have the range of contrasts in his earlier stories (not necessarily a bad thing). The monetary figures are far out of date. An $18 a day hotel room doesn't imply the luxury it did then.

Philip Marlowe receives an early morning telephone call to follow a passenger on the Super Chief. [That was an express railroad train in those bygone days.] Marlowe does this even he knows little about this job. [He needed the money?] He learns others are interested in his subject for their own reasons. Was she a murderess who got off because of a quirk in the law? [Chandler must have been talking to Erle Stanley Gardner.] Is there a nasty blackmailer pestering Eleanor King? Will somebody stop him? Marlowe has the same kind of adventures with the same kind of people that you find in his earlier works. One big difference is that middle-aged Marlowe refuses payment from a client, as if money means nothing to him! There is less violence too. In the past Marlowe suffered beatings as if Chandler was secretly angry with his fictional character. The refusal to accept payment for his work is so fantastic as to question the judgment of Chandler. Will Marlowe marry a rich heiress to live the life of Nick Charles? That was a dead-end for Dashiell Hammett. There are echoes of scenes from his earlier works. And old, rich, and sick man hired Marlowe but the ending leaves few people satisfied. Or is that the most realistic ending?

LOOKING FOR THE HEART OF SATURDAY NIGHT
Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's classic noir hard-boiled, fundamentally honest private detective forever literarily associated with Los Angeles and its means streets is a bit off course here in his search for the inevitable exotic/diabolical `missing woman' (`dame' for the non-politically correct types)outside of San Diego. And it is more than the geography that is off. I love Chandler as a great writer with a good ear from the West Coast American scene in the 1940's but hasn't Marlowe followed that woman before in a previous novel? You get my drift. Sure there is plenty of sparse but functional dialogue, physical action and a couple of plot twists but Marlowe needs to think about that rest home for worn- out indigent gumshoes (since he never made enough money). He has taken one too many hits on the head for the lastest worthy cause. Give me those background oil derricks that sound like money churning out the wealth while looking for General Sternwood's Rusty Regan in Big Sleep or the run down stucco flats in pursue of Moose's Velma in Farewell, My Lovely any day. However, even on his uppers as always with Chandler you get high literature in a plebian package. Read on.

"He had a gun, but I had a tyre iron"
In 1953, Raymond Chandler published his finest work, "The Long Goodbye." It took him five years to release his next Philip Marlowe mystery, but in 1958 he finally released "Playback," a reworking of a rejected screenplay Chandler had written. In "Playback," aging private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by a gruff law firm to follow a young woman, but he's never told why he's following her or truthfully who she is. Reluctantly Marlowe goes along with it all, but finds there's a lot he doesn't know when an egotistic and curious man begins harrassing Marlowe's target.

Many a person has called "Playback" Chandler's weakest novel, and they're not wrong. The writing lacks the luster and appreciation for life found in Chandler's other books, and the mystery is lacking in the complexity and therefor intrigue which previous Marlowe mysteries held. The conclusion of the mystery is equally unspectacular. But it's not all bad: even at his weakest, Raymond Chandler stands head and shoulders above the rest. There are a number of delightful lines in the book, and it's never once dull. If nothing else, the beautiful and wonderfully upbeat ending makes reading it worthwhile.

Unfortunately, "Playback" was the final novel Chandler published before his death in 1959. (The beginnings of his next Marlowe mystery, "Poodle Springs," can be found in his short story collection "The Simple Art of Murder.") Despite its status as Chandler's weakest work, "Playback" is a fitting and suitably low-key close to the portfolio of one of the greatest American writers who ever lived. The novel's final line cheerily states, "The air was full of music," closing the book on Mr. Philip Marlowe, and though it's been a hard goodbye, "Playback" makes it a sweet one.