Raymond Chandler's unknown thriller: the screenplay of playback.

THE FIRST LINE I ever read by Raymond Chandler made me want to read everything else he wrote: "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."

That struck me as an ultimate in side-of-the-mouth detective-story wit, and I went looking for more of it. Even Chandler never matched it--he wasn't P. GF. Wodehouse--but he turned out to be wonderful anyway. He took detective fiction seriously, the way Ted Williams took the challenge of hitting a flying shpere with a cylinder seriously, except that Chandler batted about .900.

He despised the old brain-teaser detective fiction exemplified by AGatha Christie: The artifice of it repelled him. Dashiell Hammett was his master, and in his manifesto, "The Simple Art of Murder," he insisted that murder in art should imitate murder in life, with messiness and loose ends and no false symmetries of suspicion.

It's a matter of taste, and if I were in traction for six months I think I'd rather have all of Agatha Christie than an equal number of the hard-boiled boys. She took her craft seriously too. What sets Chandler apart is that he had the rate gift of putting a voice on a page. The stories are good, but they might be throwaway fiction if Philip Marlowe didn't tell them.

The quality of the Marlowe stories can be suggested by imagining George Orwell solving murders, at physical risk to himself, and then writing about them. You would read not only because murder is interesting but even more because the narrator's reactions would be interesting. Marlowe doubles the reader's absorption in the events of the story. He tells what he experiences in a level tone that never obscures or upstages the events themselves, and he reveals himself mostly in what he notices. His emotional reserve is not so much hard-boiledness as economy of self-revelation.

The impact of Marlowe's character is a tribute to the power of the tacit. Chesterton says that Balzac's morality consists less what he explains than in what he forgets to explain; Marlowe's morality is expressed less in his moments of anger than in his casual observations and wisecracks: He has been around, and he discerns what people are up to. You wouldn't want him watching you if you were up to no good. Half the fascination of reading him is that he moves into dangerous zones; the other half is that he is a dangerous man.

Chandler himself was a lecherous drunk, but he also had a keen and merciless eye that enabled him to give Marlowe, a low-paid private op, moral authority, a sort of democratic cynicism that sandbags his social superiors, including his own clients. "I'm afraid I don't care for your manner," one of them says icily.

"I've had complaints about it," Marlowe replies, "but nothing seems to help."

During the Forties Chandler went to Hollywood and wrote highly regarded screenplays for such films as The Blue Dahlia and Double Indemnity. At Universal-International he also wrote one called Playback, which was never produced. The manuscript was mislaid and forgotten; Chandler later took the central situation and turned it into a Marlowe novel, the last one, also called Playback (1958).

The screenplay has been rediscovered, and here it is in book form. So we have a literary lab experiment: the same story (more or less) with and without Philip Marlowe.

In both versions a girl called Betty Mayfield is on the run. A man named Larry Mitchell catches on to her plight and tries to blackmail her. He turns up dead in her hotel room, murdered. What makes it especially thick for her is that she has been running away from another murder charge, though one on which she got a technical acquittal in court. (We learn this early in the screenplay, later in the Marlowe version.)

The screenplay distributes the Marlowe role between two men who try to befriend Betty. One is a police detective torn between love and duty as his superiors pressure him to arrest the obvious suspect. The other is a man-about-town who arranges her escape and takes the physical beating that would ordinarily have been Marlowe's lot.

You miss Marlowe, but then he never was the same presence in movies as in the books, even though he was well played by Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, and Robert Mitchum. Marlowe is more important as narrator than as hero, and movies are told in the third person. One of the Marlowe movies, The LAdy in the Lake, tried to get the first-person effect by letting the camera characters talking directly at it; Marlowe (played by Montgomery) appeared mostly in mirrors. It was silly, especially when the heroine moved in for a kiss, and it gave Marlowe less presence, not more, since you only knew his reactions from his voice.

As a movie, Playback benefits from his absence. There are a dozen well-drawn characters, and the sharp dialogue is fully up to snuff. You get to see things not available to a first-person narration, and your sympathies are divided with great cunning on Chandler's part. The plot takes a terrific twist at the end that wouldn't have come off nearly so well if Marlowe were telling it. So this isn't a Marlowe story minus Marlowe; it's an essentially different sort of thing. Chandler made the most of the change of genre.

Universal paid Chandler $4,000 a week, but couldn't afford to produce Playback and decided to take a tax write-off for his salary instead. He went back to writing novels, though he had a last unhappy pop at screenwriting: Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. He didn't like Hitchcock, who changed his work and, he thought, treated him shabbily, though the movie turned out fine.

It would be nice to see Playback filmed, but it probably won't happen. The story already belongs to the past, and it wasn't meant to be a period piece. Witty characters meeting at a Vancouver hotel, and keeping their clothes on, yet; a serious situation developing, but without much violence (not a single body hurtles from a twentieth-floor window)--there's something too quaint about it all.

Not that it matters much. Chandler is like Arthur Conan Doyle (whom he didn't have much use for) in that though he had professional skill to burn, his real appeal lies in a single great character he was able to reproduce again and again. Doyle disliked Sherlock Holmes and tried to kill him; but Chandler was always happy with Marlowe, through whom he expressed the better side of himself. Even his letters sound like Marlowe. It's always good to hear from him.