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October 15, 1989
Philip Marlowe Is Back, and in Trouble By ED McBAIN
POODLE SPRINGS By Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker.
he whole point,'' Raymond Chandler once wrote, ''is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens, that he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life, except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to leave his clothes.''
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Why Chandler decided to marry off his world-famous private eye, Philip Marlowe, is only one of the manifold mysteries of ''Poodle Springs,'' the novel he left unfinished at his death in 1959. Another mystery is why he chose Linda Loring, one of his least successful and appealing female characters, as the woman who would not only bed but actually wed the lonely bachelor whose undisputed turf was the glamorous and sleazy city of Los Angeles.
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The spoiled, beautiful daughter of a very wealthy man (Chandler referred to her in a letter as ''the 8 million dollar girl from 'The Long Goodbye' ''), Linda made her first appearance in that novel, which Chandler was writing while his beloved wife Cissy was dying of fibrosis of the lungs. In a letter to Edward Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, three years after Cissy's death in 1954, Chandler said, ''While she was dying, and I knew she was dying, I wrote my best book. I wrote it in agony, but I wrote it.''
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At this time, desolated and distraught, he was struggling with the writing of what would become his worst book, ''Playback,'' which had begun its life as an original screenplay for Universal some 10 years earlier. In the last chapter of that book, Linda calls from Paris to propose marriage. In referring to his choice of her as the best mate for Marlowe, Chandler wrote to a friend, ''I hope I picked the right woman.'' He picked the wrong woman. It is difficult to believe that the first four chapters of ''Poodle Springs'' were intended by Chandler to be finished work. Consisting of a mere 31 pages (but Chandler's chapters often were very short), they sketch in a Linda Loring who bears only nominal resemblance to the woman we met in her debut appearance and later in her brief phone-in. Floating about in diaphanous lingerie, dropping ''darlings'' like rose petals, she seems to be doing a bad imitation of Tallulah Bankhead. Marlowe himself, however, is the major disappointment. Enormously uncomfortable in Palm Springs (''Poodle Springs, I call it,'' Chandler wrote in 1958, ''because every third elegant creature you see has at least one poodle''), he cracks wise less humorously and with obvious strain, protests too loudly and unconvincingly about having married rich, and seems overly impressed by his own fame as a P.I. This is not the Marlowe we know and love.
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What Chandler had envisioned as only ''a good sub-plot'' - Marlowe's marriage to a girl ''whose ideas about how to live were completely antagonistic to his'' - entirely overwhelms the opening chapters of the novel. A mere hint of a case appears: a man is in trouble. Marlowe mysteriously brushes him off because he himself is looking for an office, presumably out of which he can conduct business. But a man in trouble is business, isn't he? In any case, the man sends two hoods to bring in Marlowe. Marlowe dusts them off handily and tells them he'll go see their boss later, at his own convenience. Enter Robert B. Parker. In 1988, Knopf published a centennial celebration volume, in which 23 writers of crime fiction wrote stories about Marlowe in more-or-less successful pastiches of Chandler's style. Oddly, Robert B. Parker was not one of the writers who contributed to that book. The book was dedicated to Ed Victor, the agent who represents the Chandler estate. It was Victor's idea to ask Mr. Parker to complete ''Poodle Springs,'' ''because he is the closest living writer to Mr. Chandler.''
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Indeed, it is impossible to think of any other writer in the world better qualified for the task. Not only had Robert Parker devoted part of his doctoral dissertation to Chandler, but he is himself the creator of the literate, witty and tremendously readable novels about Spenser, a private detective who has proved his staying power over the course of some 17 books and a long-running television series. That Mr. Parker pulls off the stunt is a tribute to his enormous skill. In fact, one of the true delights in ''Poodle Springs'' is to watch this engaging writer as first he tests the impossible shackles fastened to his wrists and his ankles, then breaks free of them to charge exultantly down a road Chandler himself might have chosen in his prime.
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Mr. Parker is not wholly successful in shedding the ghost of Linda Loring, who clings to the entire enterprise like a cloying designer perfume. But he has taken the slimmest of beginnings, however - the Man in Trouble's approach to Marlowe - and has fashioned from it a rattling good mystery. Hired to find a gambler who skipped, leaving a $100,000 i.o.u. behind him, Marlowe visits the man's rich, neglected wife in Palm Springs, and three chapters later is back on familiar turf again, walking into a Los Angeles modeling agency. The missing gambler, it seems, was also a so-so photographer who, in the days before he (like Marlowe) married a wealthy woman, was earning a dubious living taking pornographic photos. Such pictures, however, have a way of attracting blackmailers, and blackmail often leads to bloody murder. Before Marlowe uncovers what is really going on here, we've had two such murders, and we've been introduced to a flock of colorful California types on either side of the law. We've also been led through a labyrinthine plot premised on double identity, undying love and the bewildering charms of a scoundrel, all of which Marlowe - and Mr. Parker - handle with customary aplomb.
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At his very best, Mr. Parker sounds more like Chandler than Chandler himself - but with an edge the master had begun to lose in the waning days of his life. Here he is describing Marlowe's favorite mixed drink:
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''I sipped some of the gimlet. It was clean and cold and slid down through the desert parch like a fresh rain.''
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And here he is, throwing away a simile many other writers would kill for:''The office was as blank as a waiter's stare.''
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Or describing the Los Angeles Chandler mirrored so accurately in all of his best work:
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''I sometimes think that Southern California looks better in the rain than any other time. The rain washes away the dust and glazes the cheapness and poverty and pretense, and freshens the trees and flowers and grass that the sun has blasted. Bel Air under the wet sky was all emerald and scarlet and gold with the rain making the streets glisten.'' Nice. He is good, too, at reconstructing Marlowe's endless battle with the police. It would not be Marlowe (or Chandler) without the telephone call to the ''cop house'' after discovering a body. Nor could anyone imagine Marlowe not becoming a prime suspect, not getting batted around by at least one blackjack-wielding cop, or not being locked up overnight in the local hoosegow - all the obligatory conventions of the private-eye novel before Miranda. One of the problems with ''Poodle Springs,'' in fact, is its lack of a consistent time frame. Mr. Parker talks of electric vibrators and Canon 35-millimeter cameras, instant coffee and newsstand magazines with dirty pictures in them, loafers with gold chains across the tongues, all of which seem to be accoutrements of the here-and-now. But the style and the tone, the very sequence of events - Linda proposing to Marlowe in the 1958 novel, Linda married to Marlowe for only three weeks and four days at the beginning of this novel - condition the reader to expect a time 30 years ago, which is when Chandler was writing the opening chapters, and so the anachronisms become jarring. But this is quibbling. The book works - even if at one point the insufferable Linda says, ''This isn't working. . . . I'm not saying it's your fault . . . but it isn't working.'' This easily could have been Robert B. Parker himself, complaining out loud about Chandler's legacy: four short, unpolished chapters featuring an unrecognizable Marlowe married to an all-but-impossible woman.
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At another point in the novel, however, Mr. Parker has Marlowe thinking, ''They knew something out here. You could make anything look good with the right lighting.''
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If ''Poodle Springs'' looks good, it's because Mr. Parker knew what to do with the right lighting.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/30/specials/mcbain-marlow.html
Ed McBain's most recent novel of the 87th Precinct is ''Lullaby.''
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