Playback
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4.9 • 12 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Playback is a classic novel by Raymond Chandler, the master of hard-boiled crime.
Stalking the tawdry neon wilderness of forties and fifties Los Angeles, Raymond Chandler's hard-drinking, wise-cracking Phillip Marlowe is one of the world's most famous fictional detectives.
Playback finds Marlowe mixing business with pleasure - getting paid to follow a mysterious and lovely red-head named Eleanor King. And wherever Miss King goes, trouble seems to follow. But she's easy on the eye and Marlowe's happy to do as he's told, all in the name of chivalry, of course. But one dead body later and what started out as a lazy afternoon's snooping soon becomes a deadly cocktail of blackmail, lies, mistaken identity - and murder . . .
'Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence' Daily Telegraph
'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times
'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess
Best-known as the creator of the original private eye, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, and he is widely regarded as one of the very greatest writers of detective fiction. His books include The Big Sleep, The Little Sister, Farewell, My Lovely, The Long Good-bye, The Lady in the Lake, Playback, Killer in the Rain, The High Window and Trouble is My Business.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chandler's 1948 screenplay was presumed lost until its rediscovery in Universal Studios' archives in the 1980s, although the author had adapted it into a Philip Marlowe novel in the meantime. More recently, a French publisher adapted it into a graphic novel that is now being presented in English for the first time. While the story has down the requisite cynicism, acerbic humor and casual violence of film noir, it lacks the compelling plots and timeless characters of the author's classic scripts. A whodunit centering on Betty Mayfield, a beautiful, doomed woman on the run from a troubled past, Playback starts promisingly enough with tough, brisk dialogue and the unusual Vancouver setting. Yet by the third act the plot is bogged down by its own dejected heroine, as Betty's permanent air of defeat proves more tiring than tragic. Despite Philippe Garnier's assertion in his introduction that the script was passed over due to the vicissitudes of the studio system, it's possible that an unrelenting gloom was the real culprit. Ayroles's art employs a stiff, angular woodblocklike style that does little to capture the dark eddies of Chandler's tale.
