Category: Philip Marlowe

EP1559: Philip Marlowe: Birds on the Wing

Gerald Mohr

When a wealthy playboy falls in with some aerialists and gets a threatening letter, Marlowe is hired by the boy’s aunt to get him out of trouble.

Original Air Date: November 26, 1949

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EP1553: Philip Marlowe: The Fine Italian Hand

Gerald Mohr

An old man who runs a carousel hires Marlowe to  find out if his son is really loved by the woman his son is confronting a mobster over.

Original Air Date: November 5, 1949

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EP1547: Philip Marlowe: The Green Witch

Gerald Mohr

Marlowe is hired to guard a wealthy businessman at a Halloween masquerade party.

Original Air Date: October 29, 1949

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EP1541: Philip Marlowe: The Smokeout

Gerald Mohr

Marlowe investigates the murder of a woman who tried to hire him and tries to find “the woman in a black,” a mystery woman who claimed to see her murder.

Original Air Date: October 22, 1949

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EP1535: Philip Marlowe: The Strangle Hold

Gerald Mohr

Marlowe has to prove that a big-time wrestler crooked or his client radio producer will face a slander judgment.

Original Air Date: October 15, 1949

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EP1529: Philip Marlowe: The Open Window

Gerald Mohr
An Amnesiac woman turns to Marlowe to find out who she is and why she thinks she should be in Vancouver, BC.

Original Air Date: October 8, 1949

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Book Review: Playback


While the second to last Philip Marlowe novel was the longest, the last was the shortest, coming in at about 170 pages in its most recent reprint.

In it, Marlowe is hired by an attorney to follow a woman with very little explantion. He follows her to Esmerelda, a fictionalized version of LaJolla.

There Marlowe encounters blackmail and a corpse that disappears from the balcony of the woman he was hired to follow.

All things considered, this is a book that I wish Raymond Chandler hadn’t bothered to right. The beginning is promising, but 2/3 through the story begins to collapse.

Chandler, at his finest wrote involved and complex tales of mystery. There was always more than meets the eye to a Chandler mystery. Here, there is far less. I literally said out loud, “That’s it!” and tossed the book aside until my determination to finish books I start compelled me to read on.

Chandler’s characters are also far flatter than in previous works. You won’t find any characters who approach the level of those in other novels. There’s no one like General Sternwood, Moose Malloy, Bill Chess, or Terry Lennox in this entire novel.

While the dialogue isn’t as good as in other books, there’s still a few decent lines in this one and that’s one saving grace.

And then there are the other issues of Marlowe’s encounters with two different women. Thankfully, there’s nothing shown, which is the most artful thing about this portion of the book. The writing by Chandler is just embarrassing.  The dialogue is awful, and the set up is clumsy.   The relationship with Linda Loring in The Long Goodbye is elevated to some high exalted status of her being an old flame, when she just came over for an evening before leaving town.

Worse than that, Marlowe admits that sleeping with one of the women was unethical as an Investigator and then it does it anyway and it’s not like there’s some psychological reason for it or an internal struggle that Marlowe’s better nature loses, there’s no reason at all given.  At the end of the book, it appears that all that remains of the ethical core of Marlowe from The Big Sleep is an eccentric aversion to taking money for getting himself beaten up and inconvenienced.

The book is sad because it shows how much of a toll alcoholism and depression took on a great author. It’s one of the worst books written about a classic detective by his actual creator. It’s the one Marlowe book that’s never been made into a movie and hopefully never will be. It’s a forgettable or at least I hope it is as I’ll certainly be doing my best to forget it.

Rating: 1.75 out of 5.00

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EP1523: Philip Marlowe: The Tale of the Mermaid

Gerald Mohr
Marlowe is hired by a man in a coma with only vague information as to what he’s looking for, only that whatever it is involves $75,000.

Original Air Date: October 1, 1949

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EP1517: Philip Marlowe: The Fatted Calf

Gerald Mohr
Marlowe is hired by a cartoonist  who is concerned about his assistant’s wife’s unusual behavior.

Original Air Date: September 24, 1949

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EP1511: Philip Marlowe: The Baton Sinister

Gerald Mohr

Marlowe is hired to delivery a tapestry. He’s beaten up and the tapestry is stolen.

Original Air Date: September 17,  1949

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EP1505: Philip Marlowe: The Rustin Hickory

Gerald Mohr

A teacher from Nebraska hires Marlowe to solve a murder and keep her name out of the paper.

Original Air Date: September 10, 1949

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EP1499: Philip Marlowe: Bum’s Rush

Gerald Mohr
Marlowe’s Aunt in Montana asks him to find her boyfriend, a hobo who went to Los Angeles.

Original Air Date: September 3, 1949

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EP1493: Philip Marlowe: The Eager Witness

Gerald Mohr

A last minute defense witness in a murder trial through the conviction of a career criminal doubt and the daughter of the deceased turns to Phil to ensure her father’s murderer is convicted.

Original Air Date: August 27, 1949

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EP1487: Philip Marlowe: The Lady Killer

Gerald Mohr

A handsome young man tries to hire Marlowe but is murdered before Marlowe takes the case.

Original Air Date: August 20, 1949

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Book Review: The Long Goodbye


The Long Goodbye (1953) finds Marlowe living in a borrowed house in Los Angeles when he meets a down and out drunk and former war hero named Terry Lennox. Marlowe strikes up a friendship with the man and one morning Marlowe is awakened to find Lennox asking to be driven to Mexico. Marlowe does this and the finds out Lennox’s wealthy wife was murdered with Lennox the prime suspect. Lennox writes out a confession and kills himself in Mexico. The cops, organized crime, and the dead woman’s father want Marlowe to forget the case, yet Marlowe feels an obligation to Lennox.

To begin with, The Long Goodbye is the longest of all Chandler novels. The same publisher did the most recent reprint of the Marlowe books, and the first five novels range from 231-292 pages. This book weighs in at 379 pages.  At this point in his career, Chandler had come to realize what people looked to Marlowe books for: the characters and the dialogue, and Marlowe telling people off. So Chandler gave us this in spades.

He gives ample time to develop the Marlowe-Lennox relationship at the start of the book and there are great Chandler characters spread throughout the book including author Roger Wade, who I can see as a self-insertion character by Chandler particularly after listening to the BBC Radio 4 play about Chandler and Hitchcock attempting to collaborate on Strangers on a Train. The book is full of rich characterization, settings, and dialogue.

The downside of the Long Goodbye is that in the midst of all that, Chandler loses the story several times. It’s hard to remember a detective novel where the detective took so little interest in solving the central mystery of the book. Marlowe literally goes weeks without doing anything and there are moments in the story where I wonder if we’re ever going to get back to the Terry Lennox case. It’s hard to care about the solution to a story when the main character doesn’t seem to.

In addition, this is a much more cynical and jaded Marlowe than prior books with his remarks that organized crime is just a cost of civilization in one of the later chapters. Marlowe seems at times to be almost exaggerated at a few times even explaining he was trying to be mysterious at one point.

I also feel the relationship between Marlowe and Linda Loring or the attempt thereof was weak and far less interesting than the flirting with romance in prior novels.

Overall, this is a still a good read and is better than The Little Sister and The High Window with so many interesting characters and settings, and some great dialogue. Still, it feels less organic and its pacing issues place it below the very best Marlowe novels in the series. For my part, I think the 1970s BBC radio adaptation with Ed Bishop is probably the best way to experience the story as it manages to preserve the heart of the story while leaving a lot of extraneous elements on the cutting room floor.

Rating: 4.0 out of 5.0

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This post contains affiliate links, which means that items purchased from these links may result in a commission being paid to the author of this post at no extra cost to the purchaser