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A meek professor wins $90,000 at a casino and is murdered.
Original Air Date: April 11, 1948
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A meek professor wins $90,000 at a casino and is murdered.
Original Air Date: April 11, 1948
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A waitress asks Marlowe to look into what’s bothering a friend. She’s disappeared along with a gun.
Original Air Date: February 28, 1950
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A cowboy movie star is murdered at a ballpark.
Original Air Date: July 15, 1944
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In a country house, Simon encounters a cabbie who claimed to see ghosts dressed like people who lived 200 years ago.
Original Air Date: April 8, 1951
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Joe Friday and Ben Romero search for a kidnapped woman.
Original Air Time: June 15, 1950
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration was published in 1988 on the 100th Anniversary of Chandler’s birth. The book collects more than twenty Marlowe short stories. While most of them are by newer authors, the book includes “The Pencil,” (1959) Raymond Chandler’s last completed Philip Marlowe story which (heretofore) has only been published in this collection.
To begin with, I’ll take a look at “The Pencil.” In it, a former mob figure asks Marlowe’s help in disappearing when threatened with being penciled out by mob hitmen. The story is good, astonishingly so. It was published in 1959 a year after Chandler wrote the awful Playback and it’s stunning to think the same author wrote both. The story isn’t quite the equal of, “Red Wind,” but stands up with the other Philip Marlowe stories published in Trouble is My Business.
“The Pencil” recaptures the feel of mean streets, fascinating characters, hard boiled dialogue, and a battle with the underworld that made Marlowe stories so good in the beginning. The story also brings back Anne Riordan from, Farewell, My Lovely who is a far more interesting character than Chandler’s insipid and vapid “love interests” of his 1950s novels. It even has Marlowe getting money out of the deal, so it’s a wonderful story and it’d be great if this story were added to future editions of Trouble is My Business so a wider world of Marlowe fans could enjoy this story.
So that’s the last 30 pages of the book. What about the twenty plus stories and 339 pages that proceeded it? The writers were all admirers of Chandler and all competent as modern mystery writers. Many of them made a good try. For the most part, their stories weren’t on par with the originals but they were fairly enjoyable.
However, some stand out, both for good and ill.
Each story is prefaced by a stylistic illustration and many of them are quite evocative of the era.
While this book is out of print, it is available cheaply (1 cent plus shipping on Amazon at the time of this writing.) That makes it a no-brainer for any fan of Marlowe or hard boiled detectives in general to pick up. “The Pencil” is a superb Chandler story and at least some of the rest of the stories in the book should catch the reader’s eye.
Rating: 3.75 out of 5.0
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Johnny investigates the death of a wealthy insurance man with a young wife who’s indifferent to his death.
Original Air Date: March 30, 1958
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Nick searches for a missing maharaja and a missing priceless jewel.
Original Air Date: April 4, 1948
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Phil is hired to find to find a writer for a magazine publisher in this episode featuring an all-female guest cast.
Original Air Date: February 21, 1950
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While vacationing in the mountains, Ellery and friends stumble upon a mysterious death tied to a murderer’s ghost.
Original Air Date: April 15, 1944
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The Saint investigates a series of poisoned pen letters set to men who are thought to be interested in a lovely co-ed.
Original Air Date: April 1, 1951
The Last Act brings Roger Llewellyn’s long-running, Sherlock Holmes, one-man play to audio. The story finds a somber Holmes reflecting on his life and career after Watson’s funeral. It’s an emotional and occasionally heartbreaking performance as Holmes reflects on his friend and his career. “You never appreciate the best things, the best people, until they’re gone.”
Not every moment is somber. There are humorous moments as Holmes will reflect on one of his friend’s oddities or on Lestrade’s unremarkable career that saw him never rise above Inspector.
The play covers a variety of ground. From “The Abbey Grange” to “The Speckled Band” “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House” and The Hound of the Baskervilles and many more, Holmes offers his reflections on his cases and it’s a Tour de Force performance.
I enjoyed the second half far less as it offered insights into Holmes’ dark secrets, including his little discussed childhood. On one hand, this explained Holmes being merciful in one particular case. On the other, there’s a certain modern conceit that tries to explain everything anyone does as a result of some childhood trauma to provide motivation. This can be seen in superhero fiction where so many characters’ origins are being rewritten reflect that sort of trauma. It becomes somewhat monotonous in fiction when no one ever does anything good, noble, or heroic unless a parent was killed or was abusive, or some other trauma occurred to explain it.
I also didn’t like the way Holmes’ drug use was addressed. In the books, Watson claims to have weaned him off cocaine. However, the play insists Holmes’ use continued unknown to Watson and it leads the play into a dour place. While some would argue this is more realistic than the books (which removed the cocaine habit as it became socially unacceptable) and it might be clever to undermine audience expectations by moving from downbeat to depressing, I wasn’t pleasantly surprised by the turn.
Still, the play is well-written even if I have issues with the tone, Llewellyn’s performance as Holmes (and twelve other characters) is pitch perfect and thoroughly engaging. He captures Holmes as a man trying to come to terms with the greatest loss in his life as a lifetime of emotional restraint begins to ebb away. I only wish the play had a more satisfactory conclusion.
Rating: 4.25 out of 5.0
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Friday and Romero investigate the robbery of a furrier.
Original Air Date: June 22, 1950
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Johnny goes to Denver to investigate a series of suspicious claims being paid out.
Original Air Date: March 23, 1958
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Nick investigates a series of truck hijackings.
Original Air Date: March 28, 1948