Abstract
Chapter 4 focuses on Raymond Chandler and his farewell Philip Marlowe novel Playback. Even as it playfully dishes out familiar genre formulas and multiple playbacks of playbacks of playbacks, it bids an ironic farewell to the entire hardboiled tradition, self-reflexively deconstructing itself and the entire genre.
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Notes
- 1.
See Hubin’s bibliographical study; thoroughly revised, parts of this research are based on Swirski (2005), Chap. 5.
- 2.
See Fowler.
- 3.
Swirski (2005), Chap. 4.
- 4.
Contemporary studies foreground the diversity and malleability of the genre; for example, Mullen and O’Beirne.
- 5.
Auden, 408.
- 6.
Hiney, 277.
- 7.
1957 letter to Helga Greene, in Gardiner and Walker, 94; see also 1945 letter to Charles W. Morton, 74.
- 8.
The Big Sleep 1:589 (when possible, I refer to the Library of America edition by volume: page); Chandler frequently commented on Marlowe’s romantic or sentimental nature; see, 2:1038–9. In “Rats” (especially page 131), Rabinowitz discusses the symbolism of knight moves in The Big Sleep.
- 9.
2:651; below, Poodle Springs, 208.
- 10.
Poodle Springs, 8; Playback, 799; all subsequent references are to Playback (Library of America edition) unless indicated otherwise.
- 11.
Cumberland is Lee Kinsolving in the British edition; see Chandler’s letter from 4 October 1958, in Gardiner and Walker, 242.
- 12.
Marling (1995) 147, 150, 151; for other dismissals, see Van Dover, 35–7; Babener, 147; Peter Wolfe, 235.
- 13.
Page 150.
- 14.
Page 152; Webb praises “Chandler’s brilliantly suggestive reporting of the seedy side of California”, 6.
- 15.
In Gardiner and Walker, 220.
- 16.
Speir, 78; see also Skenazy, 6.
- 17.
Gardiner and Walker, 68; on deception and artifice, see Babener.
- 18.
À propos Mitchell’s body removal problem, Peter Wolfe declares that no rope (sic!) or person is capable of lowering a man’s dead weight down 120 feet.
- 19.
Brewer, 267, echoed by James Pepper in the preface to the first US edition; for Chandler’s hatred of it, see Hiney. Ironically, it remains the only Chandler novel never to become a feature film; even Poodle Springs is now a ho-hum HBO feature, starring James Caan.
- 20.
MacShane (1976), 143; see also 1953 letter to H.N. Swanson, in Gardiger and Walker, 235. The screenplay is available as Raymond Chandler’s Unknown Thriller; in 2013 it was turned into a graphic novel.
- 21.
Tate, 122; Marling, 147.
- 22.
In Gardiner and Walker, 90–91.
- 23.
In Gardiner and Walker, 56.
- 24.
Letter to Hillary Waugh, 1955, in Gardiner and Walker, 62.
- 25.
Page 85; following quotes from Playback: 762; 817.
- 26.
Page 88; next quote, Playback, 807.
- 27.
On Chandler-Clarendon, see Speir, 81–3; Tate, 106–10; Peter Wolfe, 234–5.
- 28.
Freeman, 240.
- 29.
Charles Rolo in the Atlantic Monthly, quoted in Van Dover, 35.
- 30.
In Gardiner and Walker, 61.
- 31.
Published in 1939 in Dime Detective Monthly; a reference to Sergeant Green may be another pun, given Chandler’s then engagement to Helga Greene.
- 32.
See Tate for several conjectural examples of allusion and wordplay.
- 33.
In Diane Johnson, 229.
- 34.
In Gardiner and Walker, 48.
- 35.
See also letter to Maurice Guinness, 1959, in Gardiner and Walker, 249.
- 36.
In Gardiner and Walker, 247; following quotes on 248, 249. Guinness was a cousin of Helga Greene.
- 37.
In Gardiner and Walker, 236.
- 38.
See Peter Rabinowitz, 129.
- 39.
See Gardiner and Walker, 241.
- 40.
In “The Turn”, Rabinowitz traces links between Chandler and Conrad, especially in their narrators.
- 41.
Page 842; see Chandler’s letters from 1939 and 1956 (in Hiney and MacShane, 18–19; 222–223), 1949 (in Gardiner and Walker, 27).
- 42.
In Gardiner and Walker, 48.
- 43.
In Gardiner and Walker, 53.
- 44.
In Gardiner and Walker, 58.
- 45.
In Gardiner and Walker, 216.
- 46.
Auden, 406.
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Swirski, P. (2016). The Not So Simple Art of Murder: Raymond Chandler. In: American Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30108-2_4
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