Poodle Springs

Raymond Chandler &
Robert B. Parker

Raymond Chandler died leaving the first four chapters of a new Philip Marlowe novel. Eventually, Robert Parker's publisher got hold of them and figured that if Parker were truly the most worthy successor to the Chandler legacy, who best to complete the book? And while the finished product is a decent piece of work, it's not Chandler, and it's not really Parker, either. It certainly isn't Marlowe.

Chandler throws a twist into the opening sentences of the book. He's married Marlowe off to a wealthy socialite who lives in Poodle Springs, a town some hours from Marlowe's usual LA haunts. Being Marlowe, he's unwilling to retire and live off his wife's fortune, so he goes about setting up shop in town. Within an hour of starting, he's already got himself a job tracking down a good-for-nothing who's welched on a hundred thousand dollar gambling debt. Problem is, the welcher happens to be the husband of one of Marlowe's wife's best friends, who also happens to be the daughter of the richest guy in a very rich neighborhood. Things aren't looking up.

That's all well and good. Where the problems come in is the reader's perceptions of Philip Marlowe, based on Chandler's novels, and where Parker takes the character. As with many of Parker's non-Spenser excursions in the last thirty years (with a few exceptions, notably All Our Yesterdays), this ends up sounding somewhat like a Spenser novel. If Spenser and Susan ever got hitched, they'd sound a lot like Marlowe and his wife. (Spenser would have a better time making fun of the houseboy, though.) Marlowe's treatment of the rich loses the edge it has in Farewell, My Lovely and becomes more Spenserian, a kind of resigned amusement instead of contempt. You get the idea.

It may have been a fine plan, and the end result is readable, but not much more than that.