The Chandler Collection: The high window ; The long good-bye ; Playback

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The Long Good-bye: The High Window; PlaybackThe Chandler-Marlowe prose is a highly charged blend of laconic wit and imagistic poetry set to breakneck rhythms... Its strong colloquial vein was a revolution in language as well as subject matter.... Marlowe liberated his author's imagination into an overheard democratic prose which is one of the most effective narrative instruments in our recent literature... Chandler's novels focus his hero's sensibility, and could almost be described as novels of sensibility. Their constant theme is big city lonliness and the wry pain of a sensitive man coping with the roughest elements of a corrupt society. It is Marlowe's doubleness that makes him interesting: the hard-boiled mask half-concealing Chandler's poetic and satiric mind Ross MacDonald