Review: "Playback" by Raymond Chandler

 

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.

Check out Playback at Amazon—click here for the paperback.

Review: "Little Old Ladies" by Simon Brett

 

“Little Old Ladies” by Simon Brett from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 2010   I’m ashamed of how few of Simon Brett’s mysteries I’ve read. A handful of shorts and a novel so long ago I don’t recall its title; although, I do remember it featured Charles Paris and that I liked it. I was thinking all this while I was reading his excellent tale, “Little Old Ladies” with a smile on my face and only a smidgen of an idea of where the story was going. Morton-cum-Budely is a swank Devon village—“of almost excessive prettiness”— mostly inhabited by retirees. And those retirees tend to be little old ladies since their husbands “were made of frailer stuff” and now spend their time lying about in the graveyard. When the Chair of the Morton-cum-Budely Village Committee, Joan Fullerton, is murdered, the village’s women are aflutter and the investigating detective, one D.I. Dromgoole, is flummoxed. In fact, Dromgoole’s bafflement is so great he follows the Golden Age tradition of enlisting the help of a little old lady, Brenda Winshott, to solve the village murder, which (of course) she does in short order. “Little Old Ladies” is a delightful, somewhat slanted—in the best possible way—traditional detective story with a light mood and a good deal of humor. Brenda Winshott, the quietest and most competent resident of Morton-cum-Budely, is a perfect sleuth. She is liked by everyone, a little sneaky, and her tactful manner puts everyone at ease. The clues are scattered in the narrative and there are three solid suspects—none of them with an alibi. I only cracked the case a few paragraphs before Brenda revealed it on the page. If you enjoy a solid whodunit with an English Village setting, “Little Old Ladies,” will do just fine. Did I mention, I smiled from the first page to the last, which is something in these harrowing times.

“Little Old Ladies” was first published in the U.K. in Women’s Weekly Special, January 2008.

Lee Majors Profile (TV Guide, Feb. 19, 1966)

This interesting article about Lee Majors—with no writer’s byline attached—appeared in the Feb. 19, 1966, issue of TV Guide. At the time, Majors was starring in ABC’s hit western, The Big Valley (1965 – 1969). My first real viewing experience with Majors was the silly but enjoyable The Fall Guy, which also aired on ABC, from 1981 to 1986. In this profile, Majors doesn’t lack confidence and while he had an admirable run on television, his hopes for an Academy Award have probably fallen away.

Review: "The Tribe" by Bari Wood

 

The Tribe by Barri Wood Valancourt Books, 2019   The Tribe, by Bari Wood—which was originally published by NAL in 1981—is a slow burning and suspenseful horror novel with a genuine Jewish golem at its core. It begins with the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp Belzec at the end of World War 2. Major Bianco, an American officer, becomes curious about the inmates living in barracks 554 because, unlike the camp’s other survivors, they are skinny but not emaciated. Bianco searches the barracks and inconceivably discovers boxes full of food, which should have been impossible since the Nazi’s were starving any Jews that weren’t sent to the gas chambers. But before Bianco can question the men of barracks 554, they disappear from a military transport. The Tribe’s roots are in Nazi Germany’s extermination camps, but the story is set in New York City and Long Island in 1980. The murder of a young Jewish academic by a ragtag Brooklyn street gang starts things off, but the police investigation is cut short when the killers—all of them are still boys, really—are beat to death in the basement of an abandoned house. The only clue, and it’s not helpful to anyone, is the clay-like mud covering the crime scene. The Tribe is a good example of 1980s horror. It is smart. The characters are well-drawn. The suspense is built scene-by-scene, and while the reader knows what the monster is, the mystery about the how and the why of the beast is intriguing and surprising. A richness of detail about the Jewish communities in New York City and Long Island, and the experiences of these men and women during the Holocaust, adds texture. The story says something about racism and hate, too. Its only real flaw, and this can be said of so many popular novels of a certain length, is that the story’s pacing slows to a crawl in the few dozen pages it takes for the characters to come together for the big and satisfying climactic showdown. *               *               * This review originally went live, in basically the same form, on January 23, 2020. The Tribe was featured in Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (2017); which is on sale for $1.99 at Amazon in Kindle (as I write this) here. It was republished as part of Valancourt’s Paperbacks from Hell series. The Paperbacks from Hell books are published in mass market—although the pricing is higher than I would like for a mass market at $19.99—and in Kindle with some truly excellent cover art.

Check out The Tribe at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "Make with the Brains, Pierre" by Dana Wilson

 

Make with the Brains, Pierre by Dana Wilson Black Gat, 2025   The only bad thing about this 1946 psychological thriller from Dana Wilson—it is her only mystery novel—is the clunker of a title: Make with the Brains, Pierre. A title more apt for a Hollywood farce than a bleak ride into tinsel town’s darker side. In fact, Bill Pronzini, in 1001 Midnights, compared Make with the Brains, Pierre with the work of Cornell Woolrich and the New York Times wrote, “[it] presents a convincing picture of a troubled mind struggling with problems beyond its power.” Pierre Bernet is a French film editor, or what they call a cutter, lured to Hollywood in the years before France was defeated by Nazi Germany. But now he is 34, unemployed, living in a tiny apartment, and in love with a woman far too young for him: Eleanor Marr. Eleanor works as an onscreen extra and while she is fond of Pierre, she loves the very married owner of a film company, Joe Sherman. As a kindness to Pierre, Eleanor convinces Joe to hire Pierre. The job is less than a week’s work, but it pays eight times what M-G-M, when Pierre last had gainful employment, paid. While working, Pierre meets Joe’s dreadful wife, who refuses to grant a divorce to her husband, and the guy bankrolling the job. A shifty and well-connected lawyer named Frank Marshall. Of course, the film cutting job is for an audio splice that is used in a fraud and no matter how Pierre tries to play things, it always ends up with him hanging from the branch. Make with the Brains, Pierre, is a solid thriller—it opens with Pierre self-destructing in his tiny apartment, water dripping on something awful in his bathtub, while he awaits to be killed by the two men outside his building. Then the narrative goes into flashback to answer, How did Pierre get here? and What the hell is in the bathtub? It is told with sly humor and a sharp commentary of both Hollywood and post-WW2 America. The suspense is ratcheted slowly from chapter to chapter until, in the last pages, there is no doubt where it is going and the full horror of Pierre’s situation is starkly written into nightmare. Make with the Brains, Pierre—bad title and all—is a damn good book. *             *             * This new Black Gat edition includes an excellent introduction by Randal S. Brandt, “The Original Bond Girl,” detailing Dana Wilson’s life. She was an actress whose second husband was Albert R. Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond film franchise, and so much more.

Check out Make with the Brains, Pierre at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback. Or at the Stark House website here.

Booked (and Printed): May 2025

 

Booked (and Printed) May 2025   We’ve all heard the rhyme, “April showers bring May flowers”—which is popularly thought to come from a poem written by Thomas Tusser in 1557; although his version reads, “Sweet April showers / Do spring May flowers”—but a more accurate maxim for Vermont would be: “May showers bring June flowers.” Yeah, May was chilly and wet around here, but all the trees have leafed and as I write this the sun is shining and the temperature is hovering at a comfy 70-degrees. But we’re still waiting for the promised flowers even as I took a leisurely, but ill-considered swim in the icy waters of Lake Bomoseen on Memorial Day. I’m certain I’ll still have goosebumps in July from that misadventure. But, all that rain made a nice excuse for spending some of May’s the spring-time weather reading. And I took advantage of it by finishing an impressive (for me at least) eight novels and two short stories. Before I go on, you’ll notice this Booked (and Printed) is shorter than usual even though my reading in May was higher than average and my reviewing for the blog was below normal. I only reviewed three of the eleven titles I read, and one, THE BLUE HORSE, by Bruce Borgos, isn’t scheduled for release until July 8—so come back and read my review then. So, since I’ve had recent trouble with eye strain, I’m going to be brief for once. First up is David Housewright’s fourth McKenzie mystery, DEAD BOYFRIENDS (2007). This is my last out-of-order title in the series and while it isn’t top-tier McKenzie, it’s still pretty good for the usual reasons: well-painted setting, a bunch of action, a solid mystery, and well, McKenzie is at the helm. Next up is Mailan Doquang’s second Rune Sarasin caper thriller, CEYLON SAPPHIRES (2025). I liked it. You can read my review here. A read a trio of titles from John Lutz, starting with a couple short stories: “TOUGH”—published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in 1980—and “HIGH STAKES,” which originally appeared The Saint Magazine in 1984. Both tales are hardboiled and fun with “High Stakes” coming out the clear winner for overall quality. In fact, I reviewed “High Stakes” here. The third Lutz title is his 1988 novel, KISS, which is private eye Fred Carver’s third outing. The Carver books are top-notch, and Kiss is no exception. The mystery is taut, the suspense is built scene-by-scene until that final climax, and Florida’s brutally hot and wet climate is perfectly detailed. An absolute winner.

ROBAK’S FIRE, by Joe L. Hensley (1986)—which is the eighth Don Robak—is a book I intended to review, but time got away from me and…. In nutshell, Robak’s Fire is a nice mixture of a private eye novel and a legal thriller. Robak’s investigative genius is done in the streets while his partners are stranded in the courtroom. The rural Indiana setting is bleak, the suspects—in what begins as an insurance case and morphs into something else—are nicely cut, and Robak’s no nonsense demeanor perfectly makes the case. Robak’s Fire isn’t brilliant, but it is a competent and an entertaining fiction. Another title I had hoped to review is John D. MacDonald’s THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY (1964). This was my third reading of the first Travis McGee novel and I was even more impressed this time than I had been the first two. The Deep Blue Good-by is, by my estimation, the best in the McGee series and perhaps one of the best men’s adventure-type detective novels ever written. JDM manages to tell a tightly plotted and a surprising story with a minimal of the cultural asides that clutters many of the other books in the series. My May foray into the literary was THE RED PONY, by John Steinbeck (1933), which is comprised of four interconnected tales about a boy named Jody growing up in the late-Nineteenth Century on a farm in northern California. The titular red pony only appears in the first tale and while that title gives the quartet a “book for kids” vibe it is anything but. There is loss, heartache, joy, and everything in between. It is realistic and damn good.  The month ended with Terry Shames’s disappointing DEEP DIVE (2025). The second book in her Jesse Madison series—Jesse is a scuba diver with aspirations of joining the FBI’s diving program, USERT—is short on plot, high on implausibility, and climaxes with a ho-hum sigh. It was good enough to finish, but it could have been so much better. As for my favorite read of the month? I’m going to break all the rules and choose The Deep Blue Good-by, even if I’ve read it before. It’s just that good.  Fin— Now on to next month…

Review: "Ceylon Sapphires" by Mailan Doquang

 

Ceylon Sapphires by Mailan Doquang Mysterious Press, 2025   Mailan Doquang’s second novel, Ceylon Sapphires—which, conveniently, is also the second in her Rune Sarasin thriller series—is sharp-witted, scorchingly paced, and down-right thrilling. Rune is a likable rogue with a bottomless debt to the nasty and ruthless Charles Lemaire. While Rune was working Bangkok as a jewel thief, she had the misfortune of stealing from Lemaire and now, at the threat of the only two people she loves, Rune is Lemaire’s peon. Whatever Lemaire wants stolen, Rune steals. While Napoleon Boneparte’s great-great-grand niece, Margot Steiner, is taking a private showing of the great man’s portrait in the Louvre, Rune (at the behest of Lemaire) executes a magician-like caper to steal the valuable Ceylon sapphire necklace—commissioned by the little emperor himself—from around Steiner’s neck. Rune’s dazzling misdirection and sleight-of-hand earns her the necklace. But when Rune is ordered to steal the well-guarded matching earrings, she knows Lemaire will never let her go. So Rune does the only thing she can. She makes plans to steal the earrings while at the same time plotting to get free of Lemaire. Ceylon Sapphires is a globe-trotting thriller—the action moves from Paris to Mallorca, Marseille, Amsterdam, and Berlin—with a solid plot held together by Rune’s vulnerability and flawed likability. A handful of surprises, a few gritty and realistic jewelry capers, and a couple monstrous villains keep things interesting. Lemaire’s role is mostly off-page, but his villainy is omnipresent and pushes Rune into deadlier and deadlier situations. The story flies with a sizzling pace and an easy-to-read narrative style. And, this is no easy feat in any thriller, the European settings are nicely rendered and believable. Ceylon Sapphaires is how a thriller should read, from the first page to the last, and when it was done, I was tempted to start again from the beginning. *                 *                 * Ceylon Sapphires picks up where the first Rune Sarasin novel, Blood Rubies (2024), ended, but it isn’t necessary to have read the previous book to enjoy it. But why not read Blood Rubies anyway?

Check out Ceylon Sapphires—which is scheduled for release June 3, 2025—on Amazon: click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Review: "High Stakes" by John Lutz

“High Stakes” by John Lutz from American Pulp, ed. by Gorman, Pronzini & Greenberg Carroll & Graf, 1997   John Lutz, who died in Jan. 2021 from complications of Covid at the age of 81, was a writer that was (and still is) often overlooked. Sure, he had a couple novels translated into film, including the box office hit, Single White Female (1992), starring Bridget Fonda, but it’s rare to see Lutz on anyone’s favorite author list. Maybe it’s because he had a chameleon-like ability to adapt his writing to meet market changes: He started writing suspense in the 1970s, shifted to P.I. tales in the 1980s, then in the 1990s and 2000s he rode the serial killer wave until it smashed itself dead against the rocks. And then in the late-2010s he busted out a couple espionage thrillers. Or, and this more likely, there is some other reason that I haven’t identified yet. But one thing I know: I’ve never read a John Lutz tale—novel or short story—I didn’t like. For me, one of Lutz’s greatest accomplishments for a late-20th Century fictionist is the volume of short stories he published. My guess is, and this is purely speculative, Lutz’s byline appeared on more than 100 short tales that appeared in digests and anthologies. His first, “Thieves’ Honor,” appeared in the Dec. 1966 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and he kept on publishing well into the 21st Century. Which brings me to Lutz’s exceptionally good, “High Stakes”—originally published in the June 1984 issue of The Saint. Ernie is a degenerate gambler with an instinct for survival, but his luck went sour and now he’s hiding in a crummy room in a crummier hotel. He’s dressed in a dirty brown suit and a wrinkled white shirt because he had to abandon his smart clothes as he hustled away from his last hotel ahead of the bill. Even worse, Ernie owes a substantial sum to a card sharp, Carl Atwater, with a violent reputation and there is no telling what Atwater and his goons will do to Ernie when they find him. “Thieves’ Honor” was written in the 1980s, but it has the feel of 1950s pulp; which is good since I dig that kind of thing. Ernie’s plight is well described—as is Ernie in all his cockroach glory—and Lutz takes the story into unexpected places. At least I had no idea where it was going until it got there. There is true suspense, which Lutz is exceedingly good at writing, and that final climactic twist is as ironic as anything I’ve read in a good long while. In a couple words: “Thieves’ Honor” is damn fun.

Passages: John D. MacDonald's "The Deep Blue Good-by"

A marvelous descriptive passage from John D. MacDonald’s first Travis McGee novel, The Deep Blue Good-By (1964):

Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.

Review: "Marguerite by the Lake" by Mary Dixie Carter

Marguerite by the Lake by Mary Dixie Carter Minotaur Books, 2025   Mary Dixie Carter’s second novel, Marguerite by the Lake—which is scheduled for release on May 20—is a brilliant thriller that will remind readers of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic masterpiece, Rebecca. Marguerite Gray is as successful as she is beautiful. A gardening and lifestyle influencer, Marguerite lives with her husband, Geoffrey, at their Rosecliff mansion overlooking “the spiral-shaped” Lake Spiro in rural Connecticut. Marguerite’s brand is built around Rosecliff, which she writes about and photographs exhaustively for her millions of followers. While Margeurite takes credit for Rosecliff’s glory, it is Phoenix Sullivan that designs the grounds and keeps the roses blooming. But this admittedly unequal relationship works because Phoenix would rather have her hands in the soil than anywhere else; however, their relationship begins changing when Phoenix saves Geoffrey from being crushed by a falling tree. Margeurite becomes more circumspect, even suspicious, with Phoenix. And things escalate when Geoffrey begins paying more attention to Phoenix—seeking her out on the grounds, inviting her into the house for drinks—before ultimately coaxing her into his bed. Then Marguerite plummets to her death and Phoenix moves into Rosecliff with Geoffrey. A move that seems wonderful to Phoenix at first, but she quickly begins hearing whispers from the staff. A detective, an old high school classmate of Phoenix’s, won’t stop pestering her about Marguerite’s death, and Geoffrey and Margeurite’s adult daughter, Taylor, moves back to Rosecliff. Taylor is a younger version of Margeurite and her hostility makes Phoenix feel small. And Margeurite seems to be haunting Rosecliff, speaking to Phoenix in hushed tones, and trying to destroy the younger woman. Marguerite by the Lake is a claustrophobic gem littered with paranoia, betrayal (both real and imagined), and a beating soul as terrifying as Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.” Phoenix’s unreliable narration—made so by her own paranoia and guilt—is taut with suspense and infused with a teetering madness that makes it both terrifying and fascinating. The plot twists are small and act less to surprise the reader than to push Phoenix closer to her own demise. Marguerite by the Lake is a splendid and inventive thriller, and it is hands down the best book I’ve read so far this year.

Check out Marguerite by the Lake on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Stefanie Powers Profile (TV Guide, June 21, 1980)

This terrific article, by Sheila Benson, about Stefanie Powers appeared in the June 21, 1980, issue of TV Guide. At the time, Powers was starring, along with Robert Wagner, in Hart to Hart on ABC. A lighthearted mystery, Hart to Hart, found business magnate Jonathon Hart (Wagner) and his lovely wife, Jennifer (Powers)—also a high-flying writer—solving everything from murder and blackmail to jewelry theft and financial frauds. But it’s not the storylines that made Hart to Hart memorable. It was Stefanie Powers and her on-screen sparks with Robert Wagner. I watched Hart to Hart as a kid because my older sisters watched it. But it took adulthood for me to appreciate the coolness of the show and the allure of Stefanie Powers. [click the images for a larger view]