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Farewell My Lovely
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Eight years ago Moose Malloy and cute little redhead Velma were getting married - until someone framed Malloy for armed robbery. Now his stretch is up and he wants Velma back. PI Philip Marlow meets Malloy one hot day in Hollywood and, out of the generosity of his jaded heart, agrees to help him. Dragged from one smoky bar to another, Marlowe's search for Velma turns up plenty of dangerous gangsters with a nasty habit of shooting first and talking later.
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A Fond Farewell
- By Ian C Robertson on 10-21-15
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The Lady in the Lake
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 2 hrs and 38 mins
- Abridged
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Hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe follows the trail of a missing woman in Raymond Chandler's classic mystery tale. Experience Chandler's cool wit and taut language as his most famous character travels through the sunbaked streets of Southern California, unraveling a tangled web of murder and deception. Elliott Gould, who played Marlowe in Robert Altman's film version of The Long Goodbye, once again brings L.A.'s toughest private eye to life.
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Very good but abridged?
- By E. Allison on 06-06-18
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The Little Sister
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 2 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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The Little Sister, one of noir master Raymond Chandler's later novels, paints his darkest portrait yet of the underside of the City of Angels. Detective Phillip Marlowe is once again on the case, helping a "little sister", a sweet young girl from Kansas, find her missing brother in Tinseltown. A blackmailer and an ambitious starlet play key roles in this bleak tale, Chandler's savage indictment of the Hollywood dream factory.
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A shortened version
- By Miyeon Ko on 09-03-17
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The High Window
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 2 hrs and 41 mins
- Abridged
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A wealthy Pasadena widow with a mean streak, a missing daughter-in-law with a past, and a gold coin worth a small fortune - the elements don't quite add up until Marlowe discovers evidence of murder, rape, blackmail, and the worst kind of human exploitation.
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Why abridged?
- By H.E. Bond on 07-05-17
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The Long Goodbye
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 2 hrs and 24 mins
- Abridged
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Raymond Chandler began his writing career at age 45. His muscular, fast-paced style set the standard for American hard-boiled mysteries. He distilled the essence of life in Southern California in the 1940s and 1950s. In The Long Goodbye, private eye Philip Marlowe befriends a down-on-his-luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he's divorced and remarried. She ends up dead. Soon Lennox is on the lam, and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.
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Poor Narration
- By George B. Sanderson on 09-15-16
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Trouble Is My Business
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 1 hr and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Private eye John Dalmas sets out to rescue a rich young playboy from the clutches of a fortune-hunting redhead and a blackmailing gambler. But as he through the seamy underside of L.A.'s wealth and glitz, he keeps bumping into dead bodies.
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A Great Reading of A Good Noir Story
- By FCD117 on 04-17-19
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Farewell My Lovely
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Eight years ago Moose Malloy and cute little redhead Velma were getting married - until someone framed Malloy for armed robbery. Now his stretch is up and he wants Velma back. PI Philip Marlow meets Malloy one hot day in Hollywood and, out of the generosity of his jaded heart, agrees to help him. Dragged from one smoky bar to another, Marlowe's search for Velma turns up plenty of dangerous gangsters with a nasty habit of shooting first and talking later.
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A Fond Farewell
- By Ian C Robertson on 10-21-15
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The Lady in the Lake
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 2 hrs and 38 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe follows the trail of a missing woman in Raymond Chandler's classic mystery tale. Experience Chandler's cool wit and taut language as his most famous character travels through the sunbaked streets of Southern California, unraveling a tangled web of murder and deception. Elliott Gould, who played Marlowe in Robert Altman's film version of The Long Goodbye, once again brings L.A.'s toughest private eye to life.
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Very good but abridged?
- By E. Allison on 06-06-18
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The Little Sister
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 2 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
The Little Sister, one of noir master Raymond Chandler's later novels, paints his darkest portrait yet of the underside of the City of Angels. Detective Phillip Marlowe is once again on the case, helping a "little sister", a sweet young girl from Kansas, find her missing brother in Tinseltown. A blackmailer and an ambitious starlet play key roles in this bleak tale, Chandler's savage indictment of the Hollywood dream factory.
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A shortened version
- By Miyeon Ko on 09-03-17
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The High Window
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 2 hrs and 41 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A wealthy Pasadena widow with a mean streak, a missing daughter-in-law with a past, and a gold coin worth a small fortune - the elements don't quite add up until Marlowe discovers evidence of murder, rape, blackmail, and the worst kind of human exploitation.
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Why abridged?
- By H.E. Bond on 07-05-17
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The Long Goodbye
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 2 hrs and 24 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Raymond Chandler began his writing career at age 45. His muscular, fast-paced style set the standard for American hard-boiled mysteries. He distilled the essence of life in Southern California in the 1940s and 1950s. In The Long Goodbye, private eye Philip Marlowe befriends a down-on-his-luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he's divorced and remarried. She ends up dead. Soon Lennox is on the lam, and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.
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Poor Narration
- By George B. Sanderson on 09-15-16
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Trouble Is My Business
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 1 hr and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Private eye John Dalmas sets out to rescue a rich young playboy from the clutches of a fortune-hunting redhead and a blackmailing gambler. But as he through the seamy underside of L.A.'s wealth and glitz, he keeps bumping into dead bodies.
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A Great Reading of A Good Noir Story
- By FCD117 on 04-17-19
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Killer in the Rain
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Abridged
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Here are four classic mysteries from the master of the American detective story. "Killer in the Rain" and "The Curtain" are early works that laid the groundwork for the creation of the Philip Marlowe character. "Goldfish" and "Finger Man" feature Marlowe at his very best. A must-have collection for every Chandler fan.
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Chapters by number DO NOT HELP
- By Amazon Customer on 07-30-18
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The Big Sleep
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out - and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.
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Class Noir
- By Ian C Robertson on 08-09-15
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Mandarin's Jade and Other Stories
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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So there I was, holed up in my office, trying to duck the bill collectors, when she walked in. She was the kind of sweet cookie that made your eyes water like you were hit with a 10-ton blackjack. She told me Raymond Chandler created the hard-boiled private eyes that rule American crime fiction, and this collection traces the genesis of Chandler's style in such stories as "Mandarin's Jade", "The Man Who Liked Dogs", and "Try the Girl".
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Narrator problematic
- By Leo W. Buss on 04-02-14
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Raymond Chandler: Poodle Springs (Dramatised)
- By: Raymond Chandler, Robert B Parker
- Narrated by: Toby Stephens, Lorelei King, Stephen Campbell Moore, and others
- Length: 56 mins
- Unabridged
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A brand new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of a classic Raymond Chandler mystery featuring private eye, Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is now married, living in the resort town of Poodle Springs. Once again, he sets himself up as an investigator and soon finds himself in the middle of blackmail and murder....
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These BBC performances were really well done!!!
- By Gregytect on 07-09-12
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Red Harvest
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. From the author of The Maltese Falcon.
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Great story, great narration, terrible reccording
- By yep on 08-21-14
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Red Wind
- By: Raymond Chandler
- Narrated by: Elliott Gould
- Length: 1 hr and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch." Before there was Philip Marlowe, there was John Dalmas, a character very much like Marlowe. (In some later editions of this short story, the protagonist's name is actually changed to Marlowe's.) Here, he investigates a series of murders in classic hard-boiled fashion.
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Cool story, but overpriced!
- By Old Hippy on 08-28-09
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The Glass Key
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness. A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett invented the noir crime novel.
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Pacing Quick & Plot was Goldilocks
- By Darwin8u on 05-16-12
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The Maltese Falcon
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Hard-boiled detective Sam Spade is hired to locate a client's sister by tailing the sister's companion. Spade's partner Miles Archer takes on the assignment, and quickly both Archer and the man he was shadowing are murdered. As Spade pursues the mystery of his partner's death, he is drawn into a circle of colorful characters, and they are all after a legendary statuette of a falcon that had long ago been made for King Charles of Spain. Encrusted with jewels, it is worth a fortune.
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Play it again, Sam.
- By Christopher on 04-01-04
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I, the Jury
- By: Mickey Spillane
- Narrated by: Mike Dennis
- Length: 5 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Here's Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer in their roughest and readiest—a double-strength shot of sex, violence, and action that is vintage Spillane all the way. It's a tough-guy mystery to please even the most bloodthirsty of fans!
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Mike Hammer slips easily into 21st century skin.
- By Jessica on 08-18-15
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The Dain Curse
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
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A Literary IMPOSSIBLE bottle.
- By Darwin8u on 05-12-12
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The Thin Man
- By: Dashiell Hammett
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York's coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities.
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RECORDING IS DEFECTIVE! MISSING SEVEN CHAPTERS!
- By David on 01-08-13
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The Wycherly Woman
- A Lew Archer Novel
- By: Ross Macdonald
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly—or for someone to make her disappear. And before he could locate the Wycherly girl, Archer had to reckon with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe’s mother, an eerily unmaternal blonde who kept too many residences, had too many secrets, and left too many corpses in her wake.
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Not Boring
- By b on 06-26-12
Publisher's Summary
Stalking the tawdry neon wilderness of forties and fifties Los Angeles, Raymond Chandler's hard-drinking, wise-cracking Phillip Marlowe is one of the world's most famous fictional detectives.
Playback finds Marlowe mixing business with pleasure - getting paid to follow a mysterious and lovely red-head named Eleanor King. And wherever Miss King goes, trouble seems to follow. But she's easy on the eye and Marlowe's happy to do as he's told, all in the name of chivalry, of course. But one dead body later and what started out as a lazy afternoon's snooping soon becomes a deadly cocktail of blackmail, lies, mistaken identity - and murder...
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and moved to England with his family when he was twelve. He attended Dulwich College, Alma Mater to some of the twentieth century’s most renowned writers. Returning to America in 1912, he settled in California, worked in a number of jobs, and later married. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later by his first novel.
The Big Sleep introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the often imitated but never-bettered hard-boiled private investigator. It is in Marlowe’s long shadow that every fictional detective must stand – and under the influence of Raymond Chandler’s addictive prose that every crime author must write.
Critic Reviews
"One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain." ( Sunday Times)
"Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes." (Anthony Burgess)
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- Mesa, AZ, United States
- 07-11-15
New to Chandler? End here. Don't start here.
Not my favorite Chandler. Actually, my least favorite Chandler novel. However, since almost everything else he has written deserves to be carved on a tablet and made into a Noir religion, I guess saying this one doesn't rate well against his other masterpieces isn't saying much.
I think part of my disappointment with this novel is it just seems hard when it should be easy and easy when it should be hard. Maybe part of my problem with it was Chandler just seemed tired of L.A. and tired of Marlowe. He exports Marlowe into a new town (Esmerelda, aka La Jolla) but it all just doesn't work. I ended up not caring much about Marlowe or the dame or the book. Which is sad because I read most of this damn book sitting in a San Diego hotel's basement laundry. If there were EVER a place to enjoy 'Playback' THAT would have been it. Alas, no.
Anyway, if you are new to Chandler end here, don't start here. Go read:
The Big Sleep (1939)
Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
The High Window (1942)
The Lady in the Lake (1943)
The Little Sister (1949)
Trouble is my Business
The Long Goodbye (1953)
Any of those will give you more bang for you buck.
17 of 21 people found this review helpful
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- Robert
- 10-29-15
Disappointing
Not sure what happened with this last one. It's almost like he wasn't even the author of the first quarter of the book. The style is noticeably different, lacking all of Marlowe's trademark perspective. It's odd, to say the least. Sadly, I can't recommend this one. The rest are great.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- PSL
- 02-23-16
Porter was born to "be" Marlowe!
The Porter-Marlowe duo is, as it were, serendipitous. No better match may be found between prose and prosodist.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- Hutt Wigley
- Boise, Idaho
- 04-26-15
Ray Porter reads this wonderfully!
I am a long-time fan of Chandler's work. This book was a little on the short side, but still good. Ray Porter's reading of the book really brought the story to life!
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- Gudrun
- Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories, Canada
- 03-01-17
I love Marlowe
I liked this book because I love the way Chandler writes and Ray Porter is Marlowe, so I enjoyed it, but it is not as good as the other books in the same series. I have been unable to make myself like the Chandler books that are abridged and narrated by Elliott Gould. So this is the last time I will be listening to Raymond Chandler on audible.
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- Steve Winnett
- Massachusetts
- 02-14-17
Dialogue, women and cars - vintage Chandler
I love Raymond Chandler's Marlowe books. Somehow I missed this one - until now! Terrific!
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- GerryO
- denver
- 08-31-16
Marlow's swan song.
Not the best but still good. I'd like to think our man had some happiness.
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- waelse1
- charlotte, nc USA
- 08-20-16
Great stuff
Another terrific Marlow novel, and Ray Porter is great and should read all audiobooks (unless it calls for a dame).
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- John S.
- Seattle, WA United States
- 05-31-16
Excellent narration
The series has to be read in order, both because Marlowe is mellower here than his initial hard-boiled persona, as well as that the ending needs the plot of the previous book for context. Much of the action is set between Los Angeles and San Diego, so I found it truly fascinating passing through that exact area on the train as I listened.
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- Mike T.
- 11-19-17
Lacking in story, rich in the noir feeling.
Resident damsel in distress saving knight, in not so shining armor Philip Marlowe is at it again. This book is fairly thin both in length and in story substance. But I really don't mind. The hard boiled softie Marlowe is still going strong. He annoys and pleases the ladies in equal measures (and just annoys everyone else).
Raymond Chandler - as usual a master in building a confusing story without really hiding anything from the reader.
Ray Porter - just fantastic.
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- Lornie Lou
- 10-19-16
Classic cheesy noir. Brilliantly predictable
Yet again Ray Porter delivers a 1st rate performance as Chandlers' no nonsense California dick Phillip Marlowe. Although short by usual standards the story manages to pack in all the necessary fare that show Marlowe to be the flawed, arrogant though noble guy, constantly searching for the easy life, yet failing miserably due to his uncontrollable desire to come to the aid of yet another maiden in distress. Those damn Dames!?!? Brilliant
0 of 2 people found this review helpful