Playback by Raymond Chandler · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Fiction Literature Mystery More than a year after the events of The Long Goodbye, hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by an unknown client to tail Eleanor King, a beautiful red-head. Tracking her to the resort town of Esmeralda, Marlowe must unravel the truth about Eleanor and his mysterious client before it is too late. Playback was Raymond Chandler's final novel and was published one year before his death. Since he first appeared in Chandler's The Big Sleep in 1939, Philip Marlowe has come to define our idea of the private investigator. Many of Chandler's short stories and novels featuring the Marlowe character were adapted for film and radio (including 1946 film The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart), and in 1983, the Marlowe character and many of Chandler's short stories were used as the inspiration for the television series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. The Philip Marlowe character's popularity was such that Chandler even re-released many of his early short stories, changing the names of the various protagonists to Philip Marlowe.

HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library. Adobe EPUB eBook 894.3 KB Raymond Chandler (Author) Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) was best known as the creator of fictional detective Philip Marlowe. One of the most influential American authors of crime novels and stories, his books were considered classics of the genre, and many of them were turn... Detnovel.com Detnovel.com Scholarship Raymond Chandler Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) was a highly literate outsider who used his ironic vantage on American culture to transform hard-boiled fiction. After Hammett he is the most important writer in the genre, and he was the best movie writer of the major novelists. Born in Chicago in 1888 to Irish parents, Chandler grew up in Ireland, where his mother fled after his father abandoned them. His mother's family moved to England later, in part for his education.

Young "Ray" was an extraordinary student at Dulwich, a prestigious "public school" (what Americans would call a private school). There he studied the classics and acquired a code of honor he never forgot. He learned Latin and studied in France and Germany. On a six-day civil service exam in 1907, Chandler placed first in classics and third overall out of 600 test-takers, winning a clerkship in the British Admiralty. However, he soon gave up this "job-for-life" to pursue a literary career, writing poems and publishing book reviews in London. This came to naught, so he immigrated to the U.S. in 1912. 1 A shipboard meeting led him to Los Angeles, where he settled into the progressive "Arroyo Culture" around Pasadena. He worked as an accountant with a dairy and fell in love with Cissy Pascal, a full-figured, theatrically-beautiful, married woman eighteen years older than he was. World War I interrupted the romance; Chandler joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which fought in several of the war's worst battles.

At Vimy Ridge Chandler's group was surrounded and he distinguished himself in battle; in a subsequent bombardment, everyone in his unit except Chandler was killed: he was concussed so badly he had to be evacuated. Rested and decorated, he tried to return with the Royal Flying Corps, but in 1919 he was discharged. 2 Chandler, thirty-one, tried writing for the Los Angeles Daily Express, but he left after six weeks. When his mother came to live with him, Chandler took a job with the Dabney Oil Syndicate. He was still in love with Cissy Pascal; when she divorced he rented an apartment for her in Hermosa Beach, while he lived nearby in Redondo Beach with his mother. Only after his mother died in 1924 did they marry. The oil business at Signal Hill south of L.A. was gamble and grab in the 1920's. Chandler's days were filled with con men like promoter C.C. Julian, sudden millionaires like Edward Doheny, fistfights and pickpocketings, Zoot-suiters and hookers and cops on the take.

Though Chandler ran the office for Dabney, where he was known for dictating flawless letters and rooting out inefficiency, he was often in the fields and developed an uncompromising attitude: We had a truck carrying pipe in Signal Hill... and the pipe stuck out quite a long way but there was a red lantern on it, according to law. A car with two drunken sailors and two drunken girls crashed into it and filed actions for $1,000 a piece.... The insurance company said, "Oh well, it costs a lot of money to defend these suits, and we'd rather settle." I said, "That's all every well. It doesn't cost you anything to settle. You simply put the rates up. If you don't want to fight this case, and fight it competently, my company will fight it." "At your own expense?" "Of course not. We'll sue you for what it costs us, unless you pay without that necessity." He walked out of the office. 3 Drunkenness, however, became Chandler's personal nemesis.

"At the annual oil and gas banquets of 1,000 rollicking oil men at the Biltmore," said one Dabney executive, "Chandler was a shadowy figure, stinko drunk and hovering in the wings with a bevy of showgirls, a nuisance." 4 He began to disappear from work, took up with a secretary and eventually threatened suicide. In 1932, the cellar of the Depression, Chandler was fired. He was forty-four, with a sixty-two-year-old wife and a drinking problem. Fleeing to Seattle, he lived with army buddies, and then "wandering up and down the Pacific Coast, I began to read pulp magazines," he wrote: "This was in the great days of Black Mask and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time." 5 Chandler enrolled in a correspondence course (receiving As and Bs) and listed himself in the L.A.

city directory as a writer; he lived on a small allowance from friends whom he aided in a lawsuit against Dabney Oil. He read the pulps studiously and later wrote to Erle Stanley Gardner: "I learned to write a novelette on one of yours about a man named Rex Kane...I simply made an extremely detailed synopsis of your story and from that rewrote it and then compared what I had with yours, and then went back and rewrote it some more, and so on. It looked pretty good." 6 Never facile, Chandler spent five months producing his first story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," which "Cap" Shaw bought for Black Mask for a penny a word. Soon Chandler's rate of pay rose to a nickel, but he wrote so slowly, reconceiving entire scenes rather than editing them, that even in 1938, when he also sold three stories to Dime Detective, he earned only $1,275. As an oil executive he had made $10,000 and driven a big company car. Chandler thought he could bring something new to the genre — his education, his literary background.

Charles Dickens and Henry James, as well as Ernest Hemingway, were strong stylistic models for him. The Los Angeles that he took for his setting was undergoing changes prophetic for the rest of the nation. From 500,000 people in 1912, when Chandler arrived, the population shot up to 2.2 million in 1932. Where the first immigrants had been white Midwesterners, often retired farmers (like the Iowans whom Chandler often caricatured), later immigrants were Dust Bowl Okies, or Chinese and Mexicans and blacks, whom realtors cordoned off into specific neighborhoods. In 1909 L.A. had more churches per capita than any other large U.S. city, but by 1930 the boom in the movie industry, since "talkies" were in, attracted aspiring starlets, cowboy crooners, village Lotharios and small caliber Eastern Mafiosi. Orchards disappeared under tract housing and highways replaced village lanes. 7 The changes were wrenching for Chandler, who created settings that were unmistakably Californian even in his earliest stories.

He used Santa Ana winds or the Santa Monica coast, and he bathed his characters in a translucent light. In actuality, however, the Chandlers moved from apartment to rented apartment, as the writer objected to noise or rent or décor. They hovered on the edge of poverty. Even so, when "Cap" Shaw was fired from Black Mask in 1936, Chandler quit the magazine out of loyalty. But even with the higher rates paid by Dime Detective, he made only a few thousand dollars a year. Knowing he needed to write a book, Chandler combined the plots of "Killer in the Rain" and "The Curtain," his fourth and tenth stories for Black Mask. It took three months to rewrite them as The Big Sleep , which he sold to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publisher of Hammett and Cain and the prestigious Borzoi mystery series (link here to read about the novel). It sold well, went paperback, and then sold to Hollywood. Chandler earned $2,000 and turned his back on the pulps.

8 Chandler (back row, second from left) met fellow hard-boiled writers and picked up writing tips through The Fictioneers, who included Erle Stanley Gardner and W.T. Ballard. The latter recalled Chandler as "a very retiring person who would sit at the dinners after the table had been cleared, sucking on his pipe and offering very little comment." 9 Dashiell Hammett attended one dinner and Chandler, who no longer drank, described him as "very nice-looking, tall, quiet, gray-haired, fearful capacity for Scotch, seemed quite unspoiled to me." 10 Chandler's second novel and perhaps his finest work, Farewell, My Lovely , took shape at a confusing time. He and Cissy moved constantly, though they had discovered their eventual home of La Jolla. He was already writing The Lady in the Lake, and he disliked Farewell: "Tragic realization that there is another dead cat under the house," he wrote his editors. "More than three-quarters done and no good." 11 World War II distracted him as well, and Chandler volunteered for service. Rejected, he rewrote Farewell. He and Mrs.

Knopf argued over various titles alluding to Shakespeare, but he prevailed with his second choice of Farewell, My Lovely. When the novel appeared in August 1940, sales were disappointing and Chandler was downcast. Link here to read about the novel. He returned to The Lady in the Lady, but laid it aside to write The High Window, published in 1942. This novel also had disappointing hardcover sales, but paperback and movie rights to Chandler's earlier work began to sell, and he was hired in Hollywood. To his astonishment, Chandler earned $750 a week for thirteen weeks. This was several years' pay for him. His first job was to turn James M. Cain 's Double Indemnity into a film noir for Paramount. Producer Billy Wilder, a detective novel fan, had tracked Chandler down through Knopf. The neophyte took his project home on Friday and on Monday returned with an almost complete script, including lighting directions and camera angles. Wilder had only written a few pages. Eventually they rewrote most of Cain's tough dialogue, which they found spoke to the eye rather than to the ear.

Chandler did not like Cain's treatment of sex, referring to him as "a faux naïf, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk." 12 He also muttered about Wilder's malacca cane, even as Wilder groused about Chandler's drinking. But the upshot of this celebrated collaboration was an Academy Award nomination, for which Wilder (below) gave all credit to Chandler, whom he called "one of the greatest creative minds" he had met. Chandler had exhausted himself, however, and with his wife moved to the desert near Palm Springs to recover and to write. Money began to roll in, but Chandler was fifty-six, his wife in her early seventies. When he next returned to the studios, he was not nearly as productive, but he enjoyed the Writers' Building, where coffee, liquor and food were freely available. "At the writers' table at Paramount I heard some of the best wit I've heard in my life. Some of the boys at their best when not writing." 13 His new contract called for Chandler to help on scripts in progress.

He assisted Frank Partos on And Now Tomorrow and Hagar Wilder on The Unseen, but a producer strong-armed him into Lucy's, a famous bar across the street, and got him drunk. Chandler's earlier demons returned. He mourned his lost youth increasingly, and there were a bottle in his drawer and a young woman to help him. During one affair he disappeared for several weeks; as a make-up present he bought his wife a Lincoln sedan too big for either of them to drive. 14 By 1945 Chandler was earning enough that he paid $50,000 in income tax. 15 It was also the year that Alan Ladd, Paramount's star, was due to enter the service, and the studio wanted him to star in a big movie before he left. Chandler, paid $1,000 a week for 26-weeks a year on his new, three-year contract, was to write the story, and in less than two weeks he did. But turning it into a production script was different. Director George Marshall and producer John Houseman grew nervous because Ladd was leaving in ten days.

Chandler was called in and offered a $5,000 bonus to accelerate; he considered this a "bribe" and almost quit, but he didn't want to put English public school compatriot Houseman on the spot. 16 In the most bizarre incident of his life, Chandler arranged to finish the shooting script in an alcoholic siege. Paramount had two limos standing by at his house, six secretaries in teams of two for dictation and typing, and a doctor to give him glucose injections, since he wouldn't be eating while he drank and wrote. The limos took script to the studio, brought the doctor for Cissy, and took the maid shopping. When Houseman arrived he would find the writer passed out at the table and waken him. Chandler wrote another page and drank. Eventually he finished the screenplay of The Blue Dahlia , as well as all revisions required by the producer. The movie brought him more fame (an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay) but doctoring of the final script had reduced Chandler's touch to a few sections of dialogue.

17 What Chandler really wanted was out of the movie business, but after years of poverty he couldn't bear to part with the cushion. He denounced "Writers in Hollywood" for the Atlantic, which had featured his earlier "The Simple Art of Murder " but he enjoyed consulting on Howard Hawks' version of The Big Sleep in 1946. William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett were the script-writers, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall the stars. The Chandlers made their last move that year, to a new house at 6005 Camino de la Costa, overlooking the Pacific in La Jolla. 18 Here Chandler settled into a routine of writing mornings, joining Cissy for lunch, then driving into La Jolla to do afternoon chores. He took tea with his wife at four, ate what the maid prepared for dinner, listened to Cissy play piano or to recorded music, and went to bed early. He played a bit of tennis and socialized with a few writers, but he was generally retiring. Few people saw the inside of his house. Even as he completed The Little Sister in 1948, he wrote his agent that Marlowe "is too valuable to let die out.

But I find myself spoofing more and more." 19 Sales of this book were respectable and the rights sold well, though the novel was bitter about L.A., especially Hollywood. Encroaching illnesses restricted the Chandlers' lives in the early 1950s. A chronic lung condition enfeebled Cissy, while Chandler developed a skin allergy that split his fingertips and a rash that, when it spread over his chest and neck, he needed morphine to withstand. He had to bandage his fingers to type and wear gloves to read. In 1951 Chandler put down his new novel, tentatively titled Summer in Idle Valley, to work at Paramount for $2,500 a week on Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. The two disliked each other, Chandler referring to "that fat bastard" within Hitchcock's hearing. Hitchcock assigned an assistant to rewrite the script. When he finished his novel, now titled The Long Goodbye , it was longer and more socially conscious. His agents objected: "We feel that Mr. Marlowe would suspect his own softness all the way through and deride it and himself constantly." 20 Chandler was shocked.

"I knew the character of Marlowe had changed…. But I did not realize [he] had become Christlike." 21 He rewrote immediately and extensively. "There is no doubt that Chandler intended to put all of himself into The Long Goodbye," writes biographer Frank MacShane, "He knew it was his last chance to do so." 22 An immediate critical and sales success, The Long Goodbye (1953) launched a new era in hard-boiled fiction – that of the socially, politically, racially, sexually, or environmentally conscious detective. Chandler did not revel in his success, however; after a long-planned trip to England with Cissy, her health declined – fibrosis of the lungs was the diagnosis – and she died in December 1954. She had been his one true love and an enduring chivalric ideal in his life; without her, there might not have been a Philip Marlowe. There was a void in Chandler's life, which he filled with drink, an attempted suicide, and more travel.

He returned to England, where he became a "literary personage," meeting Ian Fleming, Sonia Orwell, wife of novelist George Orwell, and attaching himself to poet Stephen Spender and his wife. The similes once uttered by Marlowe popped from his own mouth. "You go to luncheon with eight people and the next day five of them invite you to a dinner party…. So dine, drink and drab is about all you do." 23 Back in the U.S. Chandler had to dry out in a New York hospital, but a new agent established him in Palm Springs, where he finished a new novel, Playback, in 1958. After this inferior work he shuttled between England and southern California, imagining himself Sir Galahad to a series of younger women. His grief, the travel, and the drink took their toll. His agent re-established him in a La Jolla cottage, but alcoholism impaired his resistance to even minor illness. He came down with pneumonia and died at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla on March 26, 1959.

1 Details on Raymond Chandler's life from Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: Dutton, 1976), and William Marling, Raymond Chandler (Boston: Twayne, 1986) 2 Marling, Chandler, 12-13. 3 Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler , Ed. Frank MacShane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 445. 4 John Abrams in MacShane, Life, 36. 5 Chandler, Letters, 236. 6 Chandler, Letters, 8. 7 Marling, Chandler, 28. 8 Marling, Chandler, 21-24, 28-30. 9 Ballard in MacShane, 74. 10 Chandler in MacShane, 75-76. 11 Chandler, Letters, 282-83. 12 Marling, Chandler, 37; Chandler, Letters, 23. 13 MacShane, Chandler, 110. 14 MacShane, Chandler, 114.

15 Nolan, Black Mask Boys, 228. 16 Marling, Chandler, 39; Chandler, Letters, 46. 17 MacShane, Life, 116. 18 Chandler, Letters, 79; Marling, Chandler, 41-42. 19 Chandler, in MacShane, Life, 148. 20 MacShane, Chandler, 194. 21 Chandler, Letters, 315. 22 MacShane, 197. 23 MacShane, Life, 234. Here is a good academic Chandler website . Raymond Chandler (Author of The Big Sleep) edit data Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939.

In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been realized into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been realized into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. Chandler's Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, are considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". ...more Raymond Chandler - The Greatest Literature of All Time The Long Goodbye [SHOW] [HIDE] Chandler's longest novel is also his most praised.

Which makes me wonder whether it's the length the critics are praising. Or if maybe they think it must be deep since it's so long. Is.... more The new art of mystery writing He's commonly called the successor to Dashiell Hammett as the world's premier hard-boiled detective fiction writer. Some would say, greater than Hammett. His major creation, L.A. gumshoe Philip Marlowe, has become the archetypal private eye, more iconic and more enduring than any of Hammett's Continental Op, Sam Spade or Nick Charles, and more than any of the successive contenders like Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer or Robert B. Parker's Spenser. Raymond Chandler shares much else with Hammett, besides having created a memorable character portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in a film noir classic. For one thing, he didn't publish all that much. But he started writing late in life—in 1933, right around the time Hammett was ending his publishing career. Chandler was forty-five when he first broke into print.

(He was actually older than Hammett.) He had been born in Chicago but was raised in England and studied law in France and Germany, before returning to the U.S. in 1912. He was in the Canadian army during the Great War and afterwards had jobs in business before his career failed during the Depression. Like Hammett a decade earlier, he began with stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask. In his lifetime he produced only seven novels—low output in the popular crime field. His famous sleuth was also, like Hammett's protagonists, a man of principle. Despite his tough exterior and rough manners, Philip Marlowe follows a code of honour that stands out as endearingly old-fashioned in a corrupt, often vicious, world. And like Hammett's works, Chandler's novels can be read as morality tales. Beneath all the roughhousing and sexual tension can be detected a critique of American society, run by greed and big money, that makes men like Marlowe necessary.

Chandler's vision however may be less politically hard-nosed than his predecessor's (I don't think he was a Communist as Hammett was) and he may have held out greater hope for the redeeming value of individual goodness. It is surprising to find, once you add them up, how many of Chandler's hoodlums and vixens actually turn out to have good sides and do the honourable thing in a pinch. There's a sweet touch (though just a touch) of Damon Runyon sentimentality in Chandler, despite his insistence on absolute realism. He also wrote with more poetry than any other crime writer of his time. Intermittently erupting among the spare, just-the-facts sentences are arresting lines setting a scene, a throwaway wisecrack, a novel description of a dead man, a creative account of what it's like to take a bullet and or have a punch land square on your face. Most of all though, it's in his wonderful dialogue. I'm not sure anyone ever talked that concisely and cleverly in real life, but when you read it you hope maybe they did.

Macdonald said of his literary idol (and you'll find this quoted on a million book covers): "Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence." Macdonald, who emulated Chandler, did criticize him though for not bothering to work out his plots. The narrative of a private detective going about trying to solve a mystery often doesn't make sense in a Chandler novel. That is, if you notice. Chances are you become too wrapped up in the scenes of human interaction—taut, relaxed, exciting, funny, sexy by turns—to pay much attention to how they are strung together. Chandler wrote wonderful scenes. And then he pops up every now and then with a clever insight to solve part of the mystery and you realize the information was there all along but you were too caught up in the personal give-and-take to notice. Chandler's most famous novel is his first, The Big Sleep (1939), a notoriously mixed-up story, which nonetheless rewards successive readings. If you aren't familiar with the hard-boiled tradition, this is the novel to plunge into to get a sense of the genre's possibilities and difficulties.

Fan favourite Farewell, My Lovely (1940) is equally complex but the story benefits from periods when Marlowe stops to review the case, either alone or with a friend. It's also the novel in which we become more aware of Chandler's implied social critique—in the cops' reluctance to investigate the murder of blacks, in the corruption of civic politics and in the apparent evidence that good people can't get ahead in this world. Moreover, the sharp reader may pick up on the author's mockery of other wordsmiths, especially Hemingway and old-style mystery writers. The Chandler novel most highly praised by critics however may be The Long Goodbye (1953). It shows the writer in late life losing patience with the crime genre and becoming more critical of society and modern life. It's a more sprawling novel that only intermittently comes back to the mysteries that are to be solved—though quite rewardingly. His other novels, which also rank among the best detective fiction ever written, are The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), and Playback (1958). All have been adapted for film .

But you needn't start Chandler with a novel. His earlier stories have been collected in a remarkable volume, The Simple Art of Murder (1950, reprinted 1988). It is introduced with an insightful, unsparing essay by the author, written late in his life, about his craft and those who practised it before him, being particularly critical of the so-called golden age of cosy British mysteries. Also diverting is Trouble Is My Business (1950, reprinted 1988), a collection of four of his longer stories. Chandler also turned out some good screenplays, not based on his own novels, for Hollywood. Among them are scripts for Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Strangers on a Train (1951). He was nominated for Academy awards for writing the first two. His last novel Playback also started as a screenplay in 1947-48 but was never produced despite being top-notch film work. You can read Chandler's final draft in Raymond Chandler's Unknown Thriller: The Screenplay of Playback (1985).

Chandler cannibalized many of the characters and situations from the screenplay, and added Marlowe's point of view and much more to create the novel a decade later. Chandler's unfinished novel Poodle Springs was completed by Parker in 1989. Interestingly in his last few works, we see Marlowe moving towards a kind of domesticity with a well-to-do woman (introduced in The Long Goodbye) who can almost match him for spirit. The pairing is reminiscent of Nick and Nora Charles in Hammett's last detective novel and is a precursor of the more sensitive detectives in the hands of Parker and others. Parker also wrote a sequel to The Big Sleep called Perchance to Dream (1990), about which the less said the better. A better tribute to Chandler is the 1988 collection Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, which offers twenty-three Marlowe stories by other leading mystery writers, plus a pretty good previously unpublished story by the master himself. — Eric Playback (Philip Marlowe Book 8) eBook: Raymond Chandler: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store By Hayford Peirce on Feb.

24 2002 Format: Paperback Chandler wrote but 7 novels and most critics and readers divide them into two groups, the first four beginning with The Big Sleep and ending with The Lady in the Lake. These were the books that, if you hadn't already read Hammett, introduced the hardboiled thriller and the Southern California noir scene of the 30s and 40s to the general public. Most readers tend to feel that these were Chandler's best books. He wrote three more, however, The Little Sister in the late 40s, The Long Goodbye in the early 50s, and Playback a few years later. The Little Sister is generally fairly favorably viewed, and there are many critics and readers who feel that The Long Goodbye is Chandler's masterpiece. It is his longest, most subtle, most introspective, and, to me, his most compelling. Many people consider it a major part of American literature and I think it might well be the best thriller ever written. Playback, written after Chandler had moved to LaJolla, his beloved wife had died, and his alcoholism had become semi-acute, is a disaster.

The writing is flat and uninspired, the metaphors and similes that once flowed so brilliantly are forced and trite ("he was an impervious as the square root of minus five"), and Marlowe is clearly just going through the motions. If you've read all the others and loved them, I probably can't dissuade you from reading this one. If you liked the grotesquely bad Poodle Springs Murders started by Chandler and finished by Robert Parker, then you'll probably find this one acceptable also. If you barely made your way through Poodle Springs, you'll feel the same about Playback -- and wish that Chandler's last book had been the brilliant Long Goodbye. One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By Derek Austin Johnson on May 3 1999 Format: Paperback The setting--a coastal town called Esmerelda--is well-evoked. The observations are clever and occasionally poignant. And the mystery surrounding Miss Betty Mayfield shows real promise.

However, this time out the characters are familiar and too genteel, the revelations are unconvincing, and the whole thing feels tired, as if Chandler were simply going through the motions. A flat note on which to end a career. One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By McMurdock on May 13 2004 Format: Paperback Playback is the last Chandler's novel featuring the PI Philip Marlowe. The plot is far more simple than in previous Marlowe's cases and more emphasis is put in the atmosphere of the settings (a small and quited coastal village full of rich people). The book explores some of the social class-conflicts present in other Marlowe's novels although with less bitterness: the policemen are not so brutal, the richmen are not so mean. The girl, though, is as cruel as usual. The Black Lizard edition is quite good: confortable to read, aesthetically atractive. Just one mistake: the text in the back cover (yes, the one that you read before buying the book) tells you a little bit too much.

Marlowe is told to follow a girl and you only know why on chapter 24 (of the 28 of the book). Well, if you read the 12 lines of the back cover you already discovered that before you even bought the book and that spoils half of the mystery (the other half is quite predictable anyway). So the advise is: buy the book, begin reading in the first page and never look at the backcover. The book is good both for Chandler's fans and just crime novel lovers, but if you hadn't read the previous Marlowe's adventures you wont enjoy it that much. Read the other Marlowe cases first, beginning with The Big Sleep. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By Michael G. on May 24 2004 Format: Paperback Originally published in 1958, just one year before his death, Playback is the last novel completed by Raymond Chandler. As always, Chandler's writing style is first rate. Highly descriptive prose, engaging dialogue, imaginative situations and anecdotes, as well as interesting social commentary are present in abundance.

Unfortunately, the plot itself is so very thin and poorly conceived, little can be done to save it. Most of the narrative takes place not in Los Angeles but in a small resort town near San Diego. Philip Marlowe has been paid to follow a beautiful redhead though he is not told why. Because he thinks she might be in danger, Marlowe identifies himself and offers to help the redhead who is traveling under the name of Betty Mayfield. Before long, an aquaintance of Miss Mayfield turns up dead. We subsequently learn that the body was caused to disappear in a very gimmicky manner. A manner one would be more likely to expect to find in a bad episode of Mannix than in a Raymond Chandler novel. Quite frankly, when I read this particular passage in all its cheesiness, I became embarrassed for the author and his countless fans everywhere. Playback is worth reading if only to see how much Marlowe and American society had changed since the character's debut in the 1930's. Raymond Chandler is an American original, a legendary writer and pioneer of the hard-boiled detective genre. But Playback falls far short of the high standard he himself had set. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By Thomas Stamper on June 23 2004 Format: Paperback Playback doesn't have the intricate plot of the Big Sleep or the Long Goodbye, but it still has wise cracking Philip Marlowe and that's the main reason I read Chandler's work anyway. I've always liked how Marlowe gets hungry and other simple things that are left out of many detective novels. He's tough but human as he describes to his female client. "If I wasn't hard, I wouldn't be alive. If I couldn't ever be gentle, I wouldn't deserve to be alive." I have no idea whether Marlowe's life is an accurate portrayal of a Los Angeles Private Eye during the 1930-1950s. You have to figure that their lives were a lot less exciting than Philip Marlowe's. And maybe that alone makes this novel a little underrated. Its scant plot is probably more in order with what would really happen to a PI. We're pre-conditioned to every detective case being about a series of murders.

I do know that Marlowe's experiences, tactics and observations make these books a fun journey. He wrote so very few during his years that even the calmer ones like Playback are worth the time spent. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. The Most Famous Mystery Detectives The Most Famous Mystery Detectives Hercule Poirot author: AgathaChristie One of the most famous detective in the mystery fiction. The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot first appeared in 1920 in Agatha Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles.Poirot has many characteristics which have made him a legend all over the world - the odd moustache, the egg-shaped face and his high opinion of himself. He will though most likely be best remembered for his ability to solve complicated mysteries with the help of his little grey cells. Sherlock Holmes author: Arthur ConanDoyle Sherlock Holmes is the fictional creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote about the detective in a series of 60 stories published between 1887 and 1927.

Holmes was famous for his extra-keen powers of observation, which he used to solve perplexing crimes and mysteries. He operated from his flat at 221b Baker Street in London, assisted by his friend Dr. Watson. Holmes was an immediate hit and remains so popular that he is sometimes mistaken for a real historical figure. Among the most famous Holmes stories are The Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet. Ellery Queen author: ElleryQueen Ellery Queen, who appeared for the first time in "The Roman Hat Mystery," [1929] was invented by two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. Ellery Queen serves as much as investigator as author. He can entertain his reader by relating his own adventures or those of his father, retired Inspector Richard Queen, of the New York Police Department. Like a bloodhound, Queen is a private investigator who works from his apartment on West 87th Street in New York. His stories are famous for their realistic approach to deduction, and the full dialogues of the colorful and amusing personages who abound in them. Father Brown author: G.

K.Chesterton A short story collection "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911) began the career of one of most unlikely fictional detectives. The stories reveal a drab and seemingly unexceptional Roman Catholic priest -- an Englishman -- "formerly of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London." He is amusing and companionable, and, when you get to know him, uncommonly witty and bright. He is also a hard-working and dedicated priest and, in addition to that, he has an uncommon gift for solving crimes. Philip marlowe author: RaymondChandler Marlowe is perhaps the leading icon of the "hard-boiled" school of mystery writing. The fictional creation of author Raymond Chandler, Marlowe is a private detective, a smart and tough lone wolf with a sense of honor. He works mainly in Los Angeles (where Chandler himself had lived).

In all Marlowe appears in seven complete novels by Chandler, beginning with The Big Sleep (published 1939) and ending with Playback Perry Mason author: Erle StanleyGardner The world most famous literary lawer.Gardner's first Perry Mason stories THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS and THE CASE OF THE SULKY GIRL appeared in 1933. "The character I am trying to create for him is that of a fighter who is possessed of infinite patience," he explained to his publisher. Perry comes off as a particularly hardboiled lawyer/detective, throwing his weight around, duking it out with suspects, breaking and entering, and other private eye shenanigans.Readers were enthusiastic and he gave up law and wrote eighty more Masons. Nero Wolfe author: RexStout Nero Wolfe is the detective in a long-running series of mystery novels by Rex Stout. He lives in an old four-story brownstone in New York City, on West Thirty-fifth Street. Living with him are his assistant, Archie Goodwin, his cook, Fritz Brenner, and his orchid nurse, Theodore Horstmann. He engages in detection to support his two loves, food and orchids.

He says of orchids that they are "his concubines: insipid, expensive, parasitic and temperamental." Wolfe spends the hours of 9-11am and 4-6pm in the greenhouse on the roof, with Theodore and the orchids; the rest of the day is spent in his office. Lord Peter Wimsley author: DorothySayers Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey is a fictional character in a series of detective novels and short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers. Among Lord Peter's hobbies, apart from criminology, is collecting incunabula, and he is an expert on matters of food (especially wine) and male fashion, as well as on classical music.One of Lord Peter's cars is a 12-cylinder ("double-six"), 4-seated 1927 Daimler named "Mrs. Merdle" after a character in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. Lew Archer author: DashiellHammett LEW ARCHER stands with the Continental Op, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe as one of the few P.I's who actually define the genre.

What makes Archer unique among this group is not just the fact that the books are a sustained narrative spanning three decades, but that they also made the genre relevant to a changing society. The formula, where Archer reveals past crimes reflecting Greek tragedies or have Biblical allusions, become Macdonald's trade mark. Sam Spade Detective-Mystery Films Detective-Mystery Films Part 1 | Part 2 | Examples Classic Private Eyes: Classic film noir in the 1940s, from detective novel authors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, provided a number of private eyes - notably Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Sam Spade - None of the detectives was more impressive than writer Dashiell Hammett's classic and definitive hard-boiled, tough sleuth or shamus named Sam Spade, in John Huston's masterpiece The Maltese Falcon (1941) , a story of the frenzied pursuit of a Middle Eastern statuette. The lead was played by astute actor Humphrey Bogart.

[Ten years earlier, Ricardo Cortez played the role of Sam Spade in Roy Del Ruth's The Maltese Falcon (1931) (aka Dangerous Female).] The Maltese Falcon (1931) - Ricardo Cortez as Spade Satan Met a Lady (1936) - Warren William as Ted Shane (the second adaptation of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon) The Maltese Falcon (1941) - Humphrey Bogart as Spade The Life of Riley (1949) - Howard Duff as voice of Sam Spade (on radio show) The Black Bird (1975) - George Segal as "Sammy" Spade, Jr.

(a comedy sequel to the 1941 film) The Strange Case of the End of Civilization As We Know It (1977, UK) - Mike O'Malley as Spade (a Sherlock Holmes spoof) Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), 4 actors (Lon Satton, Rosita Yarboy, Keith Hodiak, Pepsi Maycock) known as Sam Spade and the Private Eyes Philip Marlowe - Bogey also portrayed novelist Raymond Chandler's gumshoe Philip Marlowe in the tangled intrigue of Howard Hawks' classic detective thriller The Big Sleep (1946) . Tough-guy Bogart also made screen history with his co-star Lauren Bacall in this popular rendition. Other actors have portrayed Raymond Chandler's Marlowe.

Murder, My Sweet (1944) - Dick Powell as Marlowe The Big Sleep (1946) - Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe Lady in the Lake (1947) - Robert Montgomery as Marlowe The Brasher Doubloon (1947) - George Montgomery as Marlowe Philip Marlowe (1959-1960) (TV series, 26 episodes) - Philip Carey as Marlowe Marlowe (1969) - James Garner as Marlowe The Long Goodbye (1973) - Elliot Gould as Marlowe Farewell, My Lovely (1975) - Robert Mitchum as Marlowe The Big Sleep (1978, UK) - Robert Mitchum as Marlowe Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (1983-1986) (TV series) - Powers Boothe as Marlowe Poodle Springs (1998) (TV movie) - James Caan as Marlowe The following chart helps to differentiate between all the various versions: Raymond Chandler's Noir Novels -- and Related Films Film Title (and Director) The Falcon Takes Over

 (1942) d.

Irving Reis based on the 1940 Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell My Lovely Private eye "Gay Lawrence" (George Sanders) aka The Falcon "Diana Kenyon" (Helen Gilbert) based on the 1940 Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) The Big Sleep (1946) d. Howard Hawks based on Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel of the same name - the first of his novels to feature Marlowe Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) Vivian Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers) Lady in the Lake (1947) d.

Robert Montgomery based on Raymond Chandler's 1943 novel Philip Marlowe (Robert Montgomery) Mountains outside Los Angeles at a resort called Little Fawn Lake Marlowe (1969) an adaptation by Stirling Silliphant of Raymond Chandler's 1949 novel The Little Sister Philip Marlowe (James Garner) a revisionist version of Raymond Chandler's 1954 detective novel The Long Goodbye Philip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) the third film adaptation of Chandler's 1940 novel, Farewell, My Lovely Philip Marlowe (Robert Mitchum) the second film adaptation of Chandler's 1939 novel Philip Marlowe (Robert Mitchum) Charlotte and Carmilla Sternwood ( Sarah Miles and Candy Clark) London Mike Hammer - Writer Mickey Spillane created the brutal and violent 'hard-boiled' character of Mike Hammer in his debut 1947 trashy novel, I, the Jury. It was also the title of the first Mike Hammer film: I, the Jury (1953), and the later 1982 remake.

The private eye was anti-Communist, very patriotic, carried a Colt .45, and was contemptuous of the legal process, although he respected traditional law enforcement. He had a partner, a secretary named Velda (portrayed variously in the feature films by Margaret Sheridan, Maxine Cooper, Pamela Duncan, and Laurene Landon). There were five 'Mike Hammer' feature films from 1953 to 1982. I, the Jury (1953), UA, filmed in 3-D, starring Biff Elliot Kiss Me Deadly (1955) , UA, d. Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph Meeker My Gun Is Quick (1957), UA, starring Robert Bray The Girl Hunters (1963, UK), Colorama Features, with author Mickey Spillane as Hammer!

I, the Jury (1982), 20th Century Fox, a remake of the 1953 film, with Armand Assante as Hammer There were six TV movies in the 1980s and 90s, and four TV series based upon fictitious New York-based private detective Mike Hammer, portrayed by four different actors: Margin for Murder (1981) (TV), with Kevin Dobson as Hammer Murder Me, Murder You (1983) (TV), with Stacey Keach as Hammer More Than Murder (1984) (TV), with Stacey Keach as Hammer The Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1986) (TV), with Stacey Keach as Hammer Mike Hammer: Murder Takes All (1989) (TV), with Stacey Keach as Hammer Come Die with Me: A Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer Mystery (1994) (TV), with Rob Estes as Hammer Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1957-1959) (syndicated TV series, with 78 episodes), with Darren McGavin Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (19

84-1985) (CBS-TV series, with 24 episodes), with Stacey Keach The New Mike Hammer (1986-1987) (CBS-TV series, with 22 episodes), with Stacey Keach (a continuation of the earlier show) Mike Hammer, Private Eye (1997-1998) (syndicated TV series with 26 episodes), also with Stacey Keach Michael Shayne - This popular, fictional Irish-American private detective was another of the popular pulp detectives in the 1940s.

The character was created by Davis Dresser (pseudonym Brett Halliday) and debuted in the novel Dividend on Death in 1939. The first appearance of Shayne in the movies was in a 7-film series of 20th Century Fox productions (from 1940-1942), starring Lloyd Nolan, and then a 5-film series of low-budget PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation) productions (from 1946-1947), starring Hugh Beaumont. Later, an NBC-TV series (from 1960-1961, with 32 episodes) starred Richard Denning as the title character, Michael Shayne.

Michael Shayne – Private Detective (1940), all with Lloyd Nolan, from 20th Century Fox Sleepers West (1941) Murder Is My Business (1946), all with Hugh Beaumont, from PRC Larceny in Her Heart (1946) Blonde for a Day (1946) Three on a Ticket (1947) Too Many Winners (1947) Nancy Drew - The adventures of 16 year-old, quick-witted, school-girl sleuth Nancy Drew, adapted from the series of mass-produced books from Edward Stratemeyer and his daughter Harriet S. Adams (with nom de plume Carolyn Keene), became the subject of four Warner Bros. films in the late 1930s, starring teenaged actress Bonita Granville: Nancy Drew, Detective (1938), WB, d. William Clemens, with Bonita Granville Nancy Drew - Reporter (1939) Nancy Drew - Trouble Shooter (1939) Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (1939) Nancy Drew (2007), WB, d.

Andrew Fleming, with Emma Roberts Dick Tracy - Dick Tracy was a detective who first appeared in Chester Gould's early 1930s action-adventure comic strip - it became an enduring and popular newspaper comic strip that was drawn by Gould until 1977. Dick Tracy originally appeared in four action-packed Republic Pictures' serial films from 1937 to 1941 (all starring Ralph Byrd), then in four RKO feature films (two with Morgan Conway, and two with Ralph Byrd), and a short-lived TV series and TV pilot. There was a major attempt to revive Dick Tracy with a 1990 film starring Warren Beatty. There was also a popular 1940s radio program. Dick Tracy (1937) - 15 part serial, Republic Pictures, with Ralph Byrd Dick Tracy Returns (1938) - 15 part serial, Republic Pictures, with Ralph Byrd Dick Tracy's G-Men (1939) - 15 part serial, Republic Pictures, with Ralph Byrd Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc.

(1941) - 15 part serial, Republic Pictures, with Ralph Byrd Dick Tracy (1945) - RKO, with Morgan Conway Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946) - RKO, with Morgan Conway Dick Tracy's Dilemma (1947) - RKO, with Ralph Byrd Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947) - RKO, with Ralph Byrd Dick Tracy (1950-1951) (ABC-TV series) - with Ralph Byrd Dick Tracy (1967) (The Plot to Kill NATO) (TV series pilot) - with Ray MacDonnell Dick Tracy (1990) - Buena Vista Pictures, with Warren Beatty A Renaissance of Police Detectives: Dana Andrews, an obsessed detective who was assigned to investigate the murder of a beautiful woman (Gene Tierney) and question suspects (Vincent Price and Clifton Webb) in Otto Preminger's classic Laura (1944) , fell in love with a painting of the victim.

In the second film version of Dashiel Hammett's novel about political corruption, The Glass Key (1942), Alan Ladd in one of his earliest films starred opposite Veronica Lake as a deadpan hero. He was often beat up by sado-masochistic gangster William Bendix during his pursuit of the truth. Glenn Ford portrayed an unrestrained police detective in pursuit of his wife's killers and corrupt cops in Fritz Lang's film noirish The Big Heat (1953) . In William Wyler's seminal cop film Detective Story (1951), bitter, tough, and by-the-book NYC detective Kirk Douglas discovered that his wife (Eleanor Parker) had a guilty secret. In two films, Paul Newman portrayed investigative detective Lew Harper: Jack Smight's Harper (1966), and The Drowning Pool (1975).

New life was infused into the detective film genre in the late 60s and the 70s, in stylish, avant-garde homages to the film noir genre, with various private eye/police thrillers: Blake Edwards' Tony Rome (1967) with Frank Sinatra as the private eye John Boorman's stylistic Point Blank (1967) starring Lee Marvin as a double-crossed criminal on the path of revenge to collect $93,000 due to him ("Somebody's gotta pay") award-winning In The Heat Of The Night (1967) with Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs - a black Philadelphian detective assisting in a homicide investigation in the South with a white racist chief of police (Rod Steiger); two sequels with Lieut. Detective Virgil Tibbs came later: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

(1970) and The Organization (1971) director Peter Yates' cop drama Bullitt (1968) with Steve McQueen (in one of his greatest performances) as a stoic police lieutenant assigned the dangerous task of protecting a star mob witness - its San Francisco car chase sequence is still considered one of the best in film history Eastwood starred as an Arizona deputy brought to NYC to fight crime in Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff (1968) - featuring an exciting motorcycle chase [this was Siegel's and Eastwood's first pairing] Frank Sinatra portrayed a tough NY detective involved in the case of the murder of a homosexual in The Detective (1968) Richard Widmark as a tough Brooklyn cop in Madigan (1968) Alan J.

Pakula's thriller Klute (1971) with small-town detective Donald Sutherland investigating the stalking of a high-priced NYC hooker (Jane Fonda) by a killer Robert Blake as an Arizona motorcycle cop in Electra Glide in Blue (1973) a group of NYC detectives (including Roy Scheider) pursued criminals in innumerable car chases in The Seven-Ups (1973) Charles Bronson starred as a NY cop in LA fighting against a criminal group of Vietnam vets in The Stone Killer (1973) the complex private eye story of cynical J. J.

Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in search of corruption (land-grabs and water rights scandals) in 1930s Los Angeles in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) in director John Sturges' McQ (1974) and Douglas Kickox's Brannigan (1975), John Wayne starred as an aging police officer Robert Mitchum portrayed a weary ex-GI who returned to Japan to help an army friend locate his Mob-kidnapped daughter in The Yakuza (1975) The Dirty Harry Films: In the early 70s and for almost two decades, Clint Eastwood starred as the magnum-packing Dirty Harry. The original film in the series about the fascist, vigilante-hero cop was the action film Dirty Harry (1971) , directed by Eastwood's directorial mentor Don Siegel. It unleashed a flurry of similar, quasi-Mickey Spillane thrillers.

In the first of many sequels, Eastwood starred as the intolerant Harry Callahan on the trail of the elusive 'Scorpio killer': Sudden Impact (1983) The Dead Pool (1988) In the same decade, director William Friedkin's crime thriller The French Connection (1971) won the Best Picture Academy Award for its realistic story of the pursuit of drug kingpins and a shipment of heroin by two unorthodox New York City police detectives (Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle and Roy Scheider). The pursuit of the drug dealers in Marseilles continued in director John Frankenheimer's The French Connection II (1975). Gene Hackman also portrayed a Hollywood detective on the track of a missing, reckless nymphet teenager (a young Melanie Griffith) in the Florida Keys in director Arthur Penn's suspenseful but under-rated Night Moves (1975). In Stephen Frears' satirical British film Gumshoe (1972), Albert Finney as a Liverpool nightclub worker lived out his dream by becoming a detective to solve a murder mystery.

The Lethal Weapon Series: A popular multi-part, LA cop adventure series featured the partner duo of retiring cop Danny Glover and a suicidally-crazed Mel Gibson: Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) Recent Mystery Films: Crime Thrillers In the Coen Brothers' dark Blood Simple (1983), sleazy private eye Emmet Walsh was hired by a jealous husband to kill his adulterous wife (Frances McDormand) and her lover. Their dramatic mystery crime-thriller Fargo (1996) featured Best Actress-winning Frances McDormand as an unconventional, pregnant police investigator named Marge. Anthony Minghella's noirish thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) set in sun-drenched Italy was a Hitchcock-like study of a psychopath and his victims. Another Variety of Mystery Film: Detective Spoofs and Comedies The long-running TV series Dragnet was spoofed by Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd in Tom Mankiewicz' Dragnet (1987).

And Peter Sellers appeared as clumsy, inept, and accident-prone French Inspector Jacques Clouseau in the popular series of slapstick Pink Panther detective comedies in the 60s with theme music supplied by Henry Mancini - and after (recently two films with comedian Steve Martin): Inspector Clouseau Films - The Pink Panther (1963), d. Blake Edwards (with Peter Sellers) A Shot in the Dark (1964), d. Blake Edwards (with Peter Sellers, and two new recurring characters: Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) and houseboy Cato (Burt Kwouk)) Inspector Clouseau (1968, UK/US), d. Bud Yorkin (with Alan Arkin as Inspector Clouseau) The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), d. Blake Edwards (again with Peter Sellers) The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), d. Blake Edwards (with Peter Sellers) Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), d. Blake Edwards (with Sellers' last appearance in a Pink Panther film, two years before his death) Trail of the Pink Panther (1982), d.

Blake Edwards, (with Peter Sellers, but composed only of out-takes and other clips) Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), d. Blake Edwards, (with Roger Moore as Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau - (as Turk Thrust II), and Ted Wass as Sgt. Clifton Sleigh - a Clouseau knock-off) Son of the Pink Panther (1993), d. Blake Edwards (with Roberto Benigni as Gendarme Jacques Gambrelli - the illegitimate son of Inspector Clouseau) The Pink Panther (2006), d. Shawn Levy (with Steve Martin) The Pink Panther 2 (2009), d. Harald Zwart (with Steve Martin) Philip Marlowe Philip Marlowe Created by Raymon d Chandler (1888-1959) "I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and left the room." -- from Farewell, My Lovely What more can I say about PHILIP MARLOWE?

Three Gun Mack may have been the first, Race Williams may have introduced the PI to the world and The Continental Op and Sam Spade may have staked out the ambiguous moral code that would fuel the genre for years, but it was Raymond Chandler's Marlowe that would define for all time who, what, where and why a private eye is. Traces of Marlowe run from Paul Pine to Jim Rockford to Ms. Tree to Lew Archer to Spenser. It's all here: the loneliness and infinite sadness to the quick, sarcastic cynical jibes that mask a battered and bruised romantic, the love/hate relationship with the cops, the corruption that exists in all levels of society. It's all here. Philip Marlowe, for better or worse, is the archetypical private eye. By the time he wrote his famous essay, The Simple Art of Murder, even Chandler realized it. Philip Marlowe was born in Santa Rosa, California, in "that time out of time that allowed him to be 33 in 1933, 42 in 1953, and 43 1/2 in 1958", according to Bill Henkin.

He runs a single man operation out of the Cahuenga Building in Los Angeles. Tall, and big enough to take care of himself, he likes liquor, women, reading, chess and working alone, and is educated enough that he boasts he can speak English "if he's required to." He used to work for the district attorney, but was fired for insubordination, thus starting a cliche that still hasn't run out of steam. How many ex-cops are there out there that seem to have become private eyes? Chandler first worked out the character of Marlowe in several short stories in Black Mask, featuring a variety of private eyes under different names. Among these pre-heroes were John Dalmas , Carmady , Ted Carmady and Mallory . Marlowe has been adapted for film, television, radio, comics and audiotapes by all kinds of writers, sometimes quite successfully, particularly in film and radio, and sometimes rather disappointingly (television). As the centennial of his birth approached, there was renewed interest in Chandler and a demand for new product, so Marlowe started to appear in new novels and short stories written by other writers, again with mixed results.

In 1987, Hiber Conteris wrote an original Marlowe novel, Ten Percent of Life, where Marlowe returns to hunt the killer of Chandler's literary agent. Unique, to say the least. The following year, Knopf published Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe-A Centennial Celebration, a collection of Marlowe short stories by most of the top names in detective fiction. Stories ranged from merely good to astounding, as various contemporary writers brought their own strengths to bear on ol' Phil. The glaring exemption from the list of author's was Robert B. Parker , at the time the most successful of all private detective fiction writers, whose Spenser was at times so closely modelled on Marlowe as to be a parody. The reason was soon forthcoming. Parker had been at work completing Chandler's final Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs, wherein Marlowe and Linda get married (Chandler had often mentioned how difficult he had found it to write about Marlowe in a relationship). Given Spenser's relationship with Susan, the choice of Parker seemed not only right, but natural. The response to the book was decidedly mixed. Purists and other writer's in the genre screamed.

Parker's own success with Spenser (including a truly mediocre, pretentious television show), and his perceived smugness probably contributed to the negative reaction. There was a lot of talk about audacity, and "how dare he?" Still, someone must have liked it. It was soon announced that Parker would write a second Marlowe novel, an all-original novel that acted as a sequel to The Big Sleep. When Perchance to Dream appearred in 1991, the grunts of protest rose to howls of anguish from certain quarters. It's interesting to note all of this was directed at Parker and none at two dozen or so other writers in A Centennial Celebration who had attempted exactly the same thing Parker had, albeit in short story form. THE EVIDENCE "I see (Marlowe) always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated." -- from a letter from Chandler to Maurice Guinness, dated February 21, 1959 "I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like 'em myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them long winter evenings." "I'm a romantic, Bernie.

I hear voices crying in the night and I go to see what's the matter. You don't make a dime that way. . . No percentage in it at all." -- Marlowe gives the game away, to a cop buddy "Leave us to do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment." -- Marlowe in The Little Sister To say goodbye is to die a little. Marlowe in The Long Goodbye UNDER OATH "Few pleasures in life are as seductive as reading Chandler. When I open one of his books for a quick fact-check, I might not surface until ten chapters later... When the great Bruce Taylor ran San Francisco Mystery Books, he always kept a stack of The Long Goodbye next to a sign, 'This is the best book in the store.' Maybe not, but damn close." The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014)... Buy this book ... Buy the audio ... Kindle it! SHORT STORIES Most of Chandler's short stories featured earlier prototypes for Marlowe, who went by such monickers as Mallory , Ted Carmady , or John Dalmas , when they had any name at all.

When they were later collected in volumes and reprinted, the names were mostly changed to Marlowe, however. So, here's what are generally available as Marlowe short stories these days, although only the last, "Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate" (AKA"Wrong Pidgeon" or "The Pencil"), was actually written as a Marlowe story..

"Blackmailers Don't Shoot" (December 1933, Black Mask; Mallory ) "Smart-Aleck Kill" (July 1934, Black Mask; Mallory ) "Finger Man" (October 1934, Black Mask; Carmady ) "Killer in the Rain" (January 1935, Black Mask; Carmady ) "Nevada Gas" (June 1935, Black Mask) "Spanish Blood" (November 1935, Black Mask) "Guns at Cyrano's" (January 1936, Black Mask; Ted Malvern ) "The Man Who Liked Dogs" (March 1936, Black Mask; Carmady ) "Noon Street Nemesis" (May 30, 1936, Detective Fiction Weekly; aka "Pick-up on Noon Stree") "Goldfish" (June 1936, Black Mask) "The Curtain" (September 1936, Black Mask; Carmady ) "Try the Girl" (January 1937, Black Mask; Carmady ) "Mandarin's Jade" (November 193

7, Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas ) "Red Wind" (January 1938, Dime Detective Magazine: John Dalmas ) "The King in Yellow" (March 1938, Dime Detective Magazine) "Bay City Blues" (June 1938; Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas ) "The Lady in the Lake" (January 1939, Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas ) "Pearls Are a Nuisance" (April 1939, Dime Detective Magazine) "Trouble Is My Business" (August 1939, Dime Detective Magazine; John Dalmas ) "I'll Be Waiting" (October 14, 1939, Saturday Evening Post) "The Bronze Door" (November 1939) "No Crime in the Mountains" (September 1941, Detective Story, John Evans ) "Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate" (April 6-10, 1959, London Daily Mail; as "Philip Marlowe's Last Case" in January 1962, EQMM; as "The Pencil" in September

 1965, Argosy; as "Wrong Pidgeon" in February 1969, Manhunt) COLLECTIONS & OMNIBUS EDITIONS Trouble is My Business (1972)...

Buy this book Pickup on Noon Street (1972) Collected Stories (2002; 1344 pages - all of his short fiction)... Buy this book The Big Sleep/Farewell, My Lovely/The High Window... Buy this book Omnibus edition with introduction by Diane Johnson. The Lady in the Lake/The Little Sister/The Long Goodbye/Playback.. Buy this book Omnibus edition with introduction by Tom Hiney. AND FOR THOSE WHO REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LOVE CHANDLER...

You can't go wrong with this beautiful collection from The Folio Society , who proudly provclaim that "In a world of declining publishing standards, where most books are cheaply printed, and bound using low-grade materials, (we) resolutely set store by traditional values of excellence; for our designers and production personnel the term 'quite good' means 'no good': only the best is good enough." Certainly, this handsome boxed set, comprising all seven Marlowe novels, long out of print and priced accordingly (I've seen people asking as much as $38,000 for it), is a vivid example of that maxim: these are utterly gorgeous, featuring specially commissioned artwork and an introduction by Chandler biographer ﻿Frank MacShane. Sure, you could probably buy the individual volumes, but then you wouldn't be able to see the spines all lined up: The Complete Novels

Question: Which private detective last appeared in the 1959 novel `Playback'?
Answer: Philip Marlowe