It was bad enough in Farewell, My Lovely. There was no point in competing with Spillane. Maybe the first is unnecessary at that-it doesn't seem like a sufficient occasion for someone to draw a gun, & what was Marlowe hoping to accomplish, anyway? But now as the violence is toned down, suddenly the sex gets turned up. He toned that down in the novels, The Big Sleep is the only one in which Marlowe actually kills anyone, & there are just two fights in Playback. The trouble with the short stories is that (no doubt because the pulps required it) every time the narrator goes through a door, there's bound to be either a corpse or somebody with a gun on the other side.
It's rather short, as if he was never able to work up much interest. I just read Playback for the first time this month, having read & re-read other Chandler novels & short stories for years.
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