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Raymond Chandler

Page 16

by Playback


  “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

  v3.0_r1

 

 

 


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