Playback - Softcover

Chandler, Raymond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140016082 ISBN 13: 9780140016086

Publisher: Penguin, 1973

Synopsis

Chandler's final work, the air of resignation enhances Marlowe's nobility; the ultimate loner in the urban landscape, he is as usual beset at every turn by vixens and molls, crooked cops, corrupt DAs and toughies, cheapies and playboys, but this time Marlowe is nearly over the hill and he knows it. The cover portrays Bogart and Bergman from the film and remains in literary terms a careworn classic, as effortlessly conveyed by Tormey's cover. 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.

About this title

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"

Review:

'Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the [start].' (The Daily Telegraph)

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain.' (The Sunday Times)

'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes.' (Anthony Burgess)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1973
• ISBN 10: 0140016082
• ISBN 13: 9780140016086
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160