Exhibit A,1 "Why I'll Never Join a Book Group".
The fact that I couldn't find my pocket edition of Playback, which, now that I think about it, was a Penguin edition with Bogey and Bacall somewhat inappositely on the cover, led me to read the final chapters of this great, great book as a lead-in to that book. Of course, you can see where this is going: immediately after finishing Playback, I just had to go and start reading The Long Goodbye from the beginning.
How to explain the allure of this, to my mind the Greatest Detective Novel Ever Written? The protagonist is entirely passive throughout; aside from the weregild $5500 he receives from Terry Lennox, mostly after Lennox's "suicide", he takes in exactly $20 in fees. He gets jailed, repeatedly beaten up, and meets his future wife; he solves two cases through the belief that Terry Lennox wouldn't pound his wife's face into a pulp. There are depths to his book that I might never plumb.
As for the film version: I like Robert Altman very much, but in his film he set out to debunk Marlowe, and to me, Marlowe has never been in any need of debunking. I'll stick to Bogart, Mitchum, and James Garner for my cinematic representations of Marlowe.