Playback (Philip Marlowe, #7)

by Raymond Chandler

“Guns never settle anything,” I said. “They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”

The first sensation was that if anybody spoke harshly to me I should burst out crying. The second, that the room was too small for my head.

What rattled and thumped was a knotted

towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods.

Common sense is the little man in a gray suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it’s always somebody else’s money he’s adding up.

canasta game going—two women, two men. One of the women had enough ice on her to cool the Mojave Desert and enough make-up to paint a steam yacht. Both women had cigarettes in long holders. The men with them looked gray and tired,

probably from signing checks.

“I think you need a good lawyer.” “That’s a contradiction in terms,” she sneered. “If he was good, he wouldn’t be a lawyer.”

Love fkr the profession goes back aways…

got out of the car and stamped on the cigarette. “You don’t do that in the California hills,” I told her. “Not even out of season.”

And that too goes back a ways…

studied the menu, which was almost as large as the dining room. I could have used a flashlight to read it,

the dimmest joint I was ever in. You could be sitting at the next table from your mother and not recognize her.

I lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his face. “Go fry a stale egg.” “Tough, huh,” he sneered. “I’ve pulled the arms and legs off bigger guys than you.”

“Name two of them.”

“I only smoke when I feel extra special low. What the hell’s it to you? What the hell’s it to anybody? Maybe I get caught and lose a crummy job. Maybe I get tossed in a cell. Maybe I’ve been in one all my life, carry it round with me. Satisfied?”

The toilet’s in a shed. I wash in the kitchen, at a tin sink. I sleep

on a couch with broken springs.

This is a rich man’s town. Come and see me. I live on a rich man’s property.” “There’s a piece missing from your story about Mitchel...

“I’ll look under the couch for it. It might be ...

He was a queer duck, the attendant, very queer. Kind of interesting, though. And kind of sad, too. One of the sad, one of the lost.

see the silent horror of the doctor’s smile. After a while they will put the oxygen tent over me and draw the screens around the little white bed and I shall, without even knowing it, do the one thing in the world no man ever has to do twice.”

Why will a mother rabbit trapped in a burrow by a ferret put her babies behind her and allow her throat to be torn out? Why? In two weeks more she would not even recognize them. Do you believe in God, young man?”

Nor can I imagine a heaven presided over by a benevolent character in a long white beard locally known as God. These are foolish conceptions of very immature minds. But you may not question a man’s religious beliefs however idiotic they may be.

There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium.

There was no other possible way to look at it. There are things that

are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that are facts because they have to be facts, because nothing makes any sense otherwise.

Almost always at night, because the dark hours are the hours of danger. But it has happened to me also in broad daylight—that strange, clarified moment when I suddenly know something I have no reason for knowing.

“the moment of truth”

Women have so few defenses, but they certainly perform wonders with those they have.

“How can such a hard man be so gentle?” she asked wonderingly. “If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.”

I sat down on the couch and stared at the wall. Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.

Alcohol was no cure for this. Nothing was any cure but the hard

inner heart that asked for nothing...