Raymond Chandler Playback

Raymond Chandler Playback adapted by Ted Benoit, illustrations by Francois Ayroles. This is not Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Playback, but an adaptation of the never-produced film script he wrote and later adapted himself into a Marlowe novel (it may be his worst Marlowe, and I didn't realize until I read the introduction to this work that by the time he was writing the novel he was rewriting the same story for about the fourth time and bored to tears with it even though it had made him a mint of money). As a Chandler student I loved the introduction, but Ayroles' illustration style doesn't help this work much IMHO. Still, Chandler at his worst is better plotting and characterization than most modern graphic novel writers at their best. For fans of graphic novels and/or Chandler ***
Here's a link to a Thrilling Detective page on Chandler. Maybe this is a good place for me to state my conviction that when it comes to the hard-boiled detective story Dashiell Hammett created the road, Raymond Chandler roared down it in a low-slung coupe, Ross MacDonald paved and flattened it into a superhighway, and all anyone else has been doing for the last thirty years is riding in circles on it on a bicycle.