"Get this, and get it straight: Crime is a sucker's road, and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison, or the grave." Raymond Chandler's tough, capable, smart-talking creation Philip Marlowe is one of the best-known fictional investigators in America. Through Marlowe's gaze, the translucent light of the L.A. basin comes to life, the nighttime smell of jasmine and sage, the sudden storms that cause traffic wrecks, and the desert winds that set nerves on edge. Van Heflin and Gerald Mohr each play the title role in these electric episodes, cracking wise with the of angry glee of a take-charge operative who careens, cajoles, shoves, shouts, and sometime shoots his way to a solution in his quest for a stolen object, a missing person, or a killer needing to be found. Includes two Van Heflin episodes never before available to the public since their original broadcast. EPISODES INCLUDE: The Red Wind 06-17-47; The Daring Young Dame on the Flying Trapeze 07-01-47; The King in Yellow 07-08-47; Trouble Is My Business 08-05-47; Robin and the Hood 08-19-47; Where There's a Will 10-17-48; The Last Laugh 04-02-49; The Ebony Link 05-28-49; The Dude From Manhattan 07-02-49; The August Lion 08-06-49; The Tale of the Mermaid 10-01-49; The Torch Carriers 01-07-50; Hairpin Turn 01-28-50; Ladies' Night 02-21-50; The Sword of Seibu 03-28-50; The Bedside Manner 05-30-50; The Gold Cobra 06-21-50; The Last Wish 07-19-50; The Fifth Mask 09-08-50; The Fatted Calf 09-24-50
Author
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been realized into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. Chandler's Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, are considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered to be important literary works, and three are often considered to be masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery".
