Vuosien varjo (1958)

It feels like vacation for Marlowe with pieces of the case falling together more implausibly than women into his arms 5 seconds after meeting him with zero effort. The writing is still fast but the action and plot feel half-hearted with little to solve or fight for. ( )

Not the most riveting thing Raymond Chandler ever wrote (and it's a direct sequel to his previous novel The Long Goodbye, so don't start here if you're new to Chandler), but hey...it's better than The Little Sister. The "mystery," such as it is, loses steam well before the book's conclusion, but an older, randier Philip Marlowe has some interesting encounters with various walk-on characters at a swanky beach hotel while trying to solve a murder that may or may not have actually happened. (His conversation with the physically withered but mentally acute Henry Clarendon IV is especially good.) Derived from a screenplay that went unpublished in the author's lifetime, this final full-length Marlowe adventure will entertain Chandler's fans as long as they're not expecting too much.

In terms of packaging, Playback is my favorite of the Black Lizard trade paperback editions of Chandler's works. See that shade of cool mint green on the front and back covers? It perfectly evokes the atmosphere of the novel, and the brighter, more acidic green on the spine looks fantastic on my bookshelf. ( )

Not the best Chandler. Apparently, it was the last novel in the Marlowe series. Others have nicely summarized the plot that finds Marlowe trying to understand why he has been asked to follow a woman arriving on the Santa Fe superliner. The plot's a bit weak, but you don't read Chandler for the plot. It's the characterizations and language that make Chandler so special. ( )

This is the last novel Raymond Chandler wrote, or perhaps just the last Philip Marlowe novel. Likely both given that Chandler died a year after this novel's publication. I don't think it was quite so good as the four or five other Chandler novels I've read, but it is still good (orders of magnitude better than anything Dashiell Hammett ever wrote).

In this book, Marlowe is hired to track a young woman. He has been told to pick up her trail at the train station when the "Super Chief" comes in. He has no idea why. When the young woman arrives, he sees her in an argument with a young man, who appears to be blackmailing her. Marlowe has no idea why. So, they all wander down near San Diego. Marlowe discovers a couple more people are trying to keep tabs on the young woman. And so on. The driver of the story is that Marlowe can't just go off without eventually coming to an understanding as to what it's all about. People are offering him too much money for such a seemingly simple task. So, he smells a rat. As a result, he keeps coming back to the young woman, the other people following her, a couple of bodies that show up along the way, and so on. Good classic hard-boiled, noire detective fiction. ( )

My theory: you can't appreciate this shortest and last of the Marlowe novels unless you've read all that came before it. At the same time, for those of us who've read the first six, this one isn't quite what we expected, although it's under-200-page length is a big hint that there's less plot here, less characterization, less everything. Marlowe takes a job tailing an of course beautiful redhead (are there ugly redheads in literature? I think not) and decides not too far into the job that he's on her side, or wants to be. The question that propels most of the simple plot: is she lying to him?

This book almost feels as if Chandler is playing a trick on Marlowe's fans. Hard to explain, just a sense I got while reading. Or maybe he wrote this book out of a duty not to leave Marlowe sad and long-goodbye-ing. Whatever the case, that last chapter of love's music in the air comes out of nowhere and, though good for Marlowe, leaves me wanting more. But I won't be reading Poodle Springs. Nobody should have written Marlowe but Chandler; and even the four chapters that are his reportedly read like a first draft because, well, they are a first draft. So this is the end of Marlowe's story for me. (Almost. Happily, I still have the short stories left to read, but they're chronologically set before this book.)

It's been a gritty, smoky, whiskey-washed, wise-cracking, gut-punching journey; and Philip Marlowe will always be one of my favorite characters in literature. ( )