PHILIP MARLOWE'S FINAL TASK
CHANDLER, Raymond. Playback. London:Hamish Hamilton. 1958.
8vo. Original publisher's red cloth with silver lettering to spine and publisher's emblem; black dust jacket with title in orange and photograph of author to lower wrapper; pp. 207, [1]; offsetting to and from endpapers (as usual); marginal loss to upper spine end of wrappers and vertical crease to edge of front panel; very good.
First UK edition.
"The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket"
Raymond Chandler is considered one of the forefathers of "hard-boiled" detective fiction and creator of the central trope of the "private detective" within the genre with the invention of the famous Phillip Marlowe, who appears in all seven of Chandler's novels. Up until the Great Depression, Chandler was an executive at an oil company when, in 1932, he turned to writing and screen writing with his first short story appearing in the cult magazine, Black Mask in 1933. The renowned The Big Sleep was published in 1939.
Playback is Raymond Chandler's final and complete novelistic contribution. It is distinct in that it is also the only novel based further afield from Los Angeles, where Marlowe is consistently portrayed as a moral actor in a fraudulent society. In this instance, Detective Marlowe is hired by a lawyer to tail a mystery woman after she arrives in LA and escapes to the town of Esmerelda, based on La Jolla where Chandler lived in his final days and where Marlowe soon comes into contact with sinister hitmen and vengeful gangsters all in a mighty effort to unravel the young woman's past…
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