Playback is the final, complete novel by Raymond Chandler to feature his iconic creation Philip Marlowe. It was published in 1958, the year before his death.

Plot summary

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The book puts Marlowe in the position of turning against a client who has hired him (via intermediaries) to follow a woman, while continually refusing to expain why. Now older and feeling it, seemingly struggling with the weight of his own defences – his trademark cynicism – Marlowe is given the runaround by practically everyone in the small coastal resort town of Esmeralda, out of season, to which he traces the lady in question (for whom he briefly falls and with whom he sleeps). Marlowe encounters variously a taciturn lawyer and his smart secretary (with whom Marlowe also has a sexual encounter), a 'retired' gangster, over-confident would-be hard men of varying morals, a psychopath (whose wrists Marlowe smashes), decent cops, an affectingly desperate example of the Fifties American immigrant underclass and, ultimately, the very bitter old man who was presumably behind his being hired – as a stooge – in the first place.

Ultimately, Marlowe does the right thing as always and, for once, is rewarded by providence when an old flame (Linda Loring from the previous novel, The Long Goodbye), gets back in touch. The book ends on a promise of romance, which proved fruitful in the next novel, Poodle Springs (started in 1958 but left unfinished at Chandler's death; completed in 1989 by Robert B. Parker) as the pair were shown there to have married.

Source of the novel

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The novel was reworked by Chandler from a rejected film script by the same name he had written some years before. Thought by some to be superior to this book (generally considered to be the weakest of the seven Marlowe novels, perhaps due to its less complex plot and 'pat' resolution), the script has been published independently posthumously.

Trivia

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The opening lines of the second chapter served as inspiration for Jonathan Lethem's science fiction-cum-detective novel Gun, with Occasional Music: "There was nothing to it. The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket."

1958 novels | Mystery novels | Crime novels | American novels