Playback

When one goes back to Raymond Chandler one is never disappointed, and it is this, perhaps, which sets him apart from all but a handful of writers on the hard-boiled shelf. The last novel Chandler completed, Playback, is anything but tired. It is set in "Esmerelda" which anyone who's wandered around Southern California will recognize immediately as La Jolla (and it's amazing how little has changed in that provincial burg). One misses the Los Angeles in which all Chandlers's other novels are set, but thanks to the glories of Chandler's prose, and of his character, Philip Marlowe, one doesn't miss LA all that much. (That I read the novel in a vintage British Penguin green-back only enhanced the experience.)