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Playback
by
Raymond Chandler
Houghton
Mifflin, 1958
Reviewed
by
Mike
Baker
Playback
is the last book Raymond Chandler published in his lifetime and, while I
haven’t read everything he wrote, I can say categorically this is the weakest
entry to date.
The
novel opens and closes with Clyde Umney, a lawyer representing some nebulous
East Coast concern, stogeying Marlowe into taking a job tailing a young woman
for reasons he refuses to explain—but he pays well enough, and that’s
apparently enough for Marlowe. So our detective heads down to Central Station
in L.A., where the woman is supposed to arrive, and brings along a grip full
of clothes, cash, and a gun.
There,
we meet the story’s villain, Larry Mitchell. He’s well-connected but broke,
seedy, and clinging to charm like it might still work. Mitchell meets with
the young woman—who wants nothing to do with him—and then vanishes. Marlowe
follows her to some small southern California town, and the job should be
simple: observe, report, collect. But it isn’t.
Mitchell
complicates things. Marlowe can’t stand a bully, and Mitchell fits the part
too well. The woman complicates things more. Marlowe still carries the
instincts of a knight, even if the armor’s corroded and the lance is blunt.
He delays calling Umney, digging instead into what Mitchell might have had on
her. Then Mitchell turns up dead—or doesn’t. There’s no body. In true
Chandler fashion, the mystery becomes metaphysical as much as procedural.
Maybe there was a murder. Maybe there wasn’t. But Marlowe, ever the stubborn
moralist, is now in it, tangled up with a woman he barely knows and a story
that doesn’t want to be told.
And
here’s where Playback loses itself. What begins with promise descends
into a slow unraveling: a string of aimless NPCs saying things, doing little,
contributing less. A fog of narrative confusion settles in. There are murky
shenanigans, unresolved threads, and long stretches of pontificating—much of
it Chandler, or Marlowe, or some hybrid of the two, meditating on life and
death and what it all means.
It
took me until page 119 to feel even a flicker of investment. Chandler can
still craft a surgical sentence—his style is as crisp as ever—but he no
longer seems interested in building anything with them. Reading Playback
is like calling a friend while cleaning the kitchen: they’re rambling about a
trip to the library, and you’re only half-listening, more focused on the
stubborn stain you’ve been scrubbing for fifteen minutes.
There
are, as always, moments of delight—those sharp quips that cut air and page
alike—but they’re fewer and farther between. In between, we’re left with a
kind of exhausted melancholy. Chandler, who once lit noir on fire with his
wit and moral clarity, now seems lost in the haze. There’s no irony in his
musings, just the raw blurting of worn-down truisms. Mortality isn’t just a
theme here—it’s the undercurrent pulling everything under.
What’s
striking is the fear behind it. Chandler, the ultimate stylist, seems
overwhelmed by the vision he’s spent his life perfecting. The white knight
has become a disenchanted ghost, mumbling at the hollow praise still echoing
around him. He’s no longer getting it right, and he knows it.
Playback
isn’t just a detective story. It’s a last letter, written to no one in
particular. A man staring into the final dark, trying to summon meaning from
the habits of a lifetime. In the end, there’s no great twist, no satisfying
conclusion. Just a tired hero and the man who created him, both running out
the clock. And maybe that’s the most honest ending Chandler could have
written. Not with a bang, not even with a whisper—but with the slow, sinking
realization that the world doesn’t need saving, and the knight doesn’t need
to ride again*.
* *
*
* There’s a single chapter
near the end where Marlowe is searching for a waiter and tracks him to the
tiny shack he calls home—only to find him hanging in the outhouse. The story
is so messy by this point that I wasn’t sure whether it was suicide or murder.
Either way, Marlowe is gob-smacked by the horror of it, and maybe even shaken
by the thought that he played some part in the man’s death.
It’s a moment that feels like
Chandler reckoning with something personal. Maybe even entertaining the idea
of doing himself in. But history would prove he didn’t have the heart to go
out that way. Instead, he chose the long, slow exit: alcohol and maudlin
self-indulgence. Still, the chapter is striking—arguably the best in the
book.
The thing is, I love to read
well-written books, but even the writers I admire most stumble sometimes.
This might be one of those moments. But if you love Chandler, it’s like blues
harp—you play all the notes between where you are and where you’re headed.
And Playback, for all its flaws, is one of those notes. If you want to
understand Chandler, really understand him, this is part of the journey.
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