“She was dead right, of course, and I was dead wrong. But I didn’t feel wrong. I just felt sore. If she had called up half an hour earlier I might have been sore enough to beat the hell out of Steinitz—except that he had been dead for fifty years and the chess game was out of a book.”
Philip Marlowe, chess-loving paladin lost in the smog and seediness of Los Angeles, is in trouble. But then, he’s always in trouble. As his creator, the great mysterian Raymond Chandler, wrote, “Trouble is his business.”
When Chandler died on March 26, 1959, half a dozen classic procedurals behind him—books that would define how California gumshoes are supposed to behave, and that have yet to be bettered—he left four first-draft chapters of the mystery novel that would become Poodle Springs, published 30 years after his death, in 1989. Those 40 or so typescript pages introduced one of the trouble-prone Marlowe’s oddest predicaments yet: Chandler had him newly married to Linda Loring, the hard, pampered temptress of what is arguably his greatest novel, The Long Goodbye. (“If you think that my father is that kind of man,” she growls to Marlowe therein, “and if you go around broadcasting the kind of thoughts you have just expressed to me, your career in this city in your business or in any business is apt to be extremely short and terminated very suddenly.”)
Linda has come into a fat inheritance courtesy of dear old dad and has whisked Marlowe, the quintessential working-class stiff, off to live in idle poolside splendor. But Marlowe can’t sit still, and on their first day in “Poodle Springs”—Palm Springs, California, that is, so called for the spit-curled little dogs favored by the town’s rich denizens—we find him setting up shop as a private detective, with a local crook as his first client.
Chandler got no farther with his story, leaving the reader with another mystery entirely: what could the author have meant by marrying off his protagonist to a woman who had brought him so much trouble in the past? In a letter written in 1958, Chandler remarked, “I don’t know whether the marriage will last or whether [Marlowe] will walk out of it or get bounced. Of course I have to have a murder and some violence and some trouble with the cops.” What role Chandler’s Linda would have played in the mayhem Chandler was likely contemplating we will never know, although one suspects that she would have engineered a spectacular double-cross at the very least, no doubt terminating Marlowe’s career as husband suddenly and severely.
Robert Parker, the creator of the popular “Spenser” detective series, who now writes an entertaining occasional blog, was called on to fill in the blanks. He added a couple of hundred pages of Chandleresque prose to the master’s bare outline, crafting a seamless tale that preserves the original author’s voice, with its wonderful hardboiled asides (“she looked at me like a cat looks at a fish”), cynicism, throwaway period sexism (Marlowe to Linda: “You’re beautiful when you think”), and brilliant non sequiturs (“I finished my drink and poured another one. There were no Gila monsters in sight, but you never knew”).
Parker is a man of our time, not Chandler’s, and his story takes modern twists. Still, it stays on familiar ground, setting Marlowe against the usual run of gangsters, crooked cops, fourth-rate Hollywood hustlers, pornographers, good girls gone bad, and innocent proletarians caught up in the sick games of the rich. (The Long Goodbye: “Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition—hard, tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners. If it does, down comes the lid.” Take that, Rupert Murdoch!)
The Chandler/Parker collaboration makes a grand treat for fans of West Coast noir, who have had to make do without Marlowe by way of Chandler for half a century now, and it’s a book well worth revisiting—and, for that matter, bringing back into print.
