Playback

Hired through a lawyer he never actually meets, Philip Marlowe is set to follow a young woman named Betty Mayfield from the moment she steps off a train in Los Angeles. He trails her south to Esmeralda, a small, moneyed town on the California coast, where he quickly learns she is being blackmailed and is running from a past that includes a dead husband and a courtroom she only just escaped.

As bodies and complications accumulate, Marlowe has to work out who hired him and why, and whether Betty is a frightened victim or something more dangerous. Older and wearier than in his early cases, he moves through the familiar Chandler landscape of money, corruption, and lies while wrestling with his own stubborn decency.

Playback, published in 1958, was the last Philip Marlowe novel Raymond Chandler completed. Shorter and more melancholy than his classics, it is a late, autumnal entry in the series, valued for its world-weary tenderness and its glimpse of a softer Marlowe.