Raymond Chandler
Page 16
“I have a suggestion for you, Mr. Umney. Why don’t you go kiss a duck?”
There were sounds of strangled fury as I hung up on him. Almost immediately the telephone started to ring again.
I hardly heard it. The air was full of music.
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler was born in 1888 and published his first story in 1933 in the pulp magazine Black Mask. By the time he published his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), featuring, as did all his major works, the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe, it was clear that he had not only mastered a genre but had set a standard to which others could only aspire. Chandler created a body of work that ranks with the best of twentieth-century literature. He died in 1959.
OTHER BOOKS BY
RAYMOND CHANDLER
AVAILABLE AS VINTAGE eBOOKS
The Big Sleep
The High Window
Farewell, My Lovely
The Lady in the Lake
The Little Sister
The Simple Art of Murder
Trouble Is My Business
The Long Goodbye
Playback (1958)
In Chandler’s final novel, Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he’s never heard of to tail a gorgeous redhead, but decides he prefers to help out the redhead. She’s been acquitted of her alcoholic husband’s murder, but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court’s word for it.
Copyright © 1958 by Raymond Chandler
Copyright renewed 1986 by Paul Gitlin and Jonathan S. Gitlin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chandler, Raymond, 1888—1959.
Playback.
Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958
I. Title.
PS3505.H3224P6 1988 813’.52 87-45922
This book is available in a print edition from Vintage Books: ISBN 0-394-75766-1.
eISBN: 978-1-4000-3021-7
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