Philip Marlowe e Linda Loring

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.

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 http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/30/specials/mcbain-marlow.html

Ed McBain's most recent novel of the 87th Precinct is ''Lullaby.''

Raymond Chandler e Robert E. Parker - Poodle Springs (A morte v este de seda)

The dish

I’m generally not a fan of continuations or parallel novels where one author attempts to complete or extend the work of another. Very few such works earn any kind of critical acclaim; I think Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre that tells the story of Rochester’s first wife before madness overtakes her, is the only one I’ve read that is considered a strong work of literature in its own right, and it was more a work of social criticism than a narrative.

Continuations are, in my view, tougher than “authorized” sequels or prequels, because they stitch together two different prose styles and require the second writer to guess at the intended direction of the first – or to ignore it altogether. I’ve read the most popular continuation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon* and found it utterly lifeless; where even a bad Austen novel has its memorable moments, usually humorous ones, all I recall of the completed Sanditon is a lot of walking around on the rocks.

*It’s funny how often these final, unfinished novels are proclaimed by fans of the authors in question as potentially the authors’ best work; you’ll certainly hear howSanditon, which Austen abandoned after eleven chapters due to ill health, signaled a new direction for her writing, blah blah blah – just look at the unsourced praise in the Wikipedia entry on the book. This is nearly always wishful thinking on the part of fans, combined with the fact that a fragment of a novel is miles away from a completed book.

This is the long way of telling you that I entered Poodle Springs, in which Robert Parker (creator of the Spenser character) starts with the four short chapters left behind by Raymond Chandler and builds a Philip Marlowe novel on that scant foundation, with some skepticism. Chandler is, in my view, a prose master (although novelist Martin Amis would disagree), and his style is often imitated but never matched. Take the sparse, clipped phrasings of Hammett and add some of the greatest similes ever put to paper and you might build a reasonable fake, but Chandler’s writing remains unique in this or any genre. I gave Poodle Springs a fair shake, but at the end of the day it is just a nice detective novel, nowhere close to any of the five Marlowe books I’ve read.

Chandler’s four chapters include a shocking opener – Marlowe is married to Linda Loring, who first appeared in The Long Goodbye

and seems as ill-fitting a wife for the loner detective as any candidate. They’ve moved to a tony California hamlet called Poodle Springs, but Marlowe insists on earning his own living rather than becoming a kept man for his wealthy bride. He’s approached by the proprietor of a local casino of dubious legality, at which point Parker takes over. He wisely dispenses with the Loring subplot (if we can even call it that) for much of the book and focuses instead on the crime story, one that has the typical hallmarks of hard-boiled detective fiction (small number of characters in a tangled web) but with a leering crudeness that is horribly out of place in a Marlowe novel, and prose that simply can’t match the master’s:

There was a big clock shaped like a banjo on the wall back of the receptionist. It ticked so softly it took me a while to hear it. Occasionally the phone made a soft murmur and the receptionist said brightly, “Triton Agency, good afternoon.” While I was there she said it maybe 40 times, without variation. My cigarette was down to the stub. I put it out in the ashtray and arched my back, and while I was arching it in came Sondra Lee. She was wearing a little yellow dress and a big yellow hat. She didn’t recognize me, even when I stood up and said, “Miss Lee.”

That’s a lot of words without telling us anything at all. The waiting room in question has no relevance in the story. Chandler doesn’t normally waste the reader’s time like that, nor does prose ever have that choppy sound like ever period is an obstacle you hit at full speed. Parker occasionally hits with a good metaphor – “Hollywood Boulevard looked like it always did in the morning, like a hooker with her make-up off” – although even that one would never have come out of Chandler’s pen.

Parker’s plot revolves around a bigamist, some nude pictures, and a few people with behavioral issues, standard stuff for this sort of novel, but his obsession with sex borders on the puerile, at least compared to the subtle approach of Chandler, where sex is always under the surface but never out in the open. An exhibitionist wife bares all to Marlowe – who passes because he’s married, so really, what was the point of this? – and we get too much about Marlowe in the boudoir with Linda when she’s not involved in the plot at all, including a tacked-on ending that feels like a nod to Chandler’s stillborn introduction.

Which gets back to the fundamental problem with Poodle Springs: It seems likely that Chandler never intended to finish this book. Marlowe probably shouldn’t be married, and certainly shouldn’t be married to Linda Loring. Perhaps these four chapters were just Chandler exploring an idea; perhaps he realized it wasn’t going to work. Perhaps it was his own depression after the death of his wife Cissy that led him to put Marlowe into a marriage. (He only finished one novel after her death, Playback, which I haven’t read but which seems to be considered his worst completed work.) The continuation of Poodle Springs was a commercial success, but the positive reviews of the time that claim that “you can’t see the seam where Chandler stopped and Parker picked up the pen” are an insult to fans of the master’s work.

Next up: A Finnish novel, Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare, currently on sale through that link for $5.60.

http://meadowparty.com/blog/?p=1907

John Blades. - Resurrecting Philip Marlowe

Robert B. Parker Picks Up Where Raymond Chandler Left Off In 1959

November 28, 1988|By John Blades.

With the death of Raymond Chandler in 1959, his roguish private eye, Philip Marlowe, also came to an especially unfitting end. Recently married to the chic and wealthy Linda Loring, Marlowe was about to get entangled in yet another labyrinthine mystery when Chandler died, leaving only four short chapters of ``The Poodle Springs Story`` complete. Case closed. R.I.P. Philip Marlowe.

But like Nero Wolfe, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of other resilient sleuths, Marlowe has refused to stay buried. His latest resurrection will come at the tough but expert hands of Robert B. Parker, himself a private-eye novelist (``A Savage Place``), hired by Putnam Berkley Publishing to polish off Chandler`s unfinished manuscript

The news that Parker will complete ``The Poodle Springs Story`` was particularly welcome and timely, arriving during the 100th anniversary of Chandler`s birth. For the occasion, his private detective also was exhumed by two dozen contemporary mystery writers, from Max Allan Collins to Sara Paretsky, each of whom contributed a story to the recently published anthology, ``Raymond Chandler`s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration.``

Though invited to contribute a Marlowe story to that volume, Parker declined. ``That seemed too gimmicky and insufficiently respectful,`` explained the author, whose own private eye, Spenser, is almost as widely admired as Marlowe. As such, that makes him a prominent member of a more than slightly dishonorable lineup that includes Sam Spade, Lew Archer and Travis McGee, among numerous others.

Parker didn`t hesitate when he was approached about completing ``The Poodle Springs Story,`` however. ``I agreed to do it because the publisher offered me a lot of money,`` he said. ``It turns your head every time.``

But Parker confessed that his motives weren`t quite so coldblooded or commercial. ``I also agreed out of loyalty to Chandler,`` he said. ``I read

`The Big Sleep` when I was about 14, and it took the top of my head off. As far as I know, I`ve read everything he wrote. I grew up wanting to be Chandler.``

If not the hardest boiled of the private-eye novelists, Parker is surely among the best educated, with a doctorate in English literature from Boston University. Chandler figured prominently in his doctoral thesis, which traced the evolution of the American frontier hero into the modern private detective. Though he may have started out as a Marlowe clone, Spenser quickly evolved into his own man, prowling the mean streets of Boston rather than Los Angeles, along with a sidekick called Hawk. ``Chandler is more aware of social class than I am,`` Parker said. ``Also, I think he`s less optimistic, more committed to the idea of pervasive corruption.``

Before he actually starts to write his Marlowe book, Parker said he expects to have reread Chandler`s seven novels, so he can fully absorb the author`s style. ``I don`t want this to be a Spenser novel under another name. If I do that, I`m sure to get some heat from readers and critics, complaining that I`m meddling with the corpus of a giant.``

Among other reasons, Parker welcomed the opportunity to complete ``The Poodle Springs Story`` so he would be the first to find out what happens. Chandler left him few clues, Parker said, except for the prediction in one of his letters that Marlowe`s marriage to Linda was not likely to be blissful.

Though he already has the novel outlined, Parker wouldn`t offer any clues about how he plans to thicken and resolve the plot. Readers will have to wait until late next year when the book is published. ``It`s a superstition. I refuse to talk about a story before I get it down on paper.``

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-11-28/features/8802200372_1_poodle-springs-story-private-eye-travis-mcgee

Santiago González - Philip Marlowe: el adiós de un duro

gaucho malo

Visiones y ficciones

Febrero 5, 1977

Nota de archivoPublicada originalmente en el diario La Prensa de Buenos Aires.

Raymond Chandler concibió al héroe de sus novelas, el detective Philip Marlowe, antes que otra cosa como una actitud ante la vida, actitud que era puesta a prueba cada vez que debía enfrentarse con esas extremas situaciones donde las tensiones que dibujan la trama oculta de una sociedad afloran abruptamente en el crimen.

Por eso el detective no se convierte -como ocurre con la mayoría de sus congéneres- en un caracter cristalizado, en un mero repertorio de “tics” sancionado como fórmula exitosa.

Contrariamente, Marlowe tiene historia: cada caso supone un compromiso personal que lo afecta en igual medida que a los otros personajes envueltos, y deja sobre sí algo más que magulladuras.

Si bien Chandler siempre fue en extremo riguroso respecto de la solidez de la intriga en el relato policial, ya a partir de El largo adiós se observa un desplazamiento de esa preocupación: “Me tenía sin cuidado -señala por entonces- que la intriga fuese bastante obvia. Lo que me importaba era la gente, este extraño y corrupto mundo en que vivimos, y cómo toda persona que intenta ser honesta termina pareciendo sentimental, o simplemente tonta”.

En la novela que publicó poco antes de morir, Cóctel de barro, ese desplazamiento es aún más marcado: a esa altura de su vida y su carrera, Chandler parecía más preocupado por avanzar en la historia de su personaje, por desentrañar su destino, que por cualquier otra consideración.

Y bien, el Marlowe que aparece en esta novela (y que ya se anuncia en El largo adiós) es un Marlowe cansado y decepcionado, rechazado incluso por aquellos a quienes pretende ayudar, y devuelto una y otra vez a la soledad de su cuarto.

Entonces es capaz de embarcarse en todo tipo de dificultades por algo que se pareció a la amistad (Terry Lennox, en El largo adiós), o sentir que ese cuarto vacío se llena de música por algo que se parece al amor (Linda Loring, en Cóctel de barro).

El duro que no se había rendido al poder de los hombres -las armas y el dinero- flaquea ahora ante el paso del tiempo, la soledad, la nostalgia, y la certeza del fracaso.

–Santiago González

http://gauchomalo.com.ar/656/raymond-chandler-coctel-de-barro/