Customer Reviews

Poodle Springs

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I found this pleasant enough, enjoyable enough. I read it easily in a couple of readings. And I did enjoy it, but it didn't grab hold of me like Raymond Chandler's stories. I had no trouble lying it down around the 2/3 point, and eventually coming back to finish it. I always had a bit more trouble lying down a Raymond Chandler story.

I didn't often stop and look through earlier parts to confirm an idea in my mind, as I did with Chandler. I didn't have any "aha!"s throughout the book.

The Marlowe characterization was weak. I didn't notice that he quit smoking in the middle of the book, as one reviewer thought he noticed...in fact, he kept up pretty well with alternating between the pipe and cigarettes all the way through. Being married does obviously create problems he hadn't had before. It does inhibit him, and just the situation does keep him from being the Marlowe we're used to. He has someone else besides himself to think of now, and it's messing up his basic style.

The case he's working on and the subplot of his shaky marriage do work together well enough, because the personal challenges in his life are affecting his feelings toward the characters involved.

On it's own, this is good enough, but not great. A larger than average percentage of the characters make it to the end of the book. And Parker doesn't have quite the photographic description of people and places that Chandler did. So it will let down Chandler & Marlowe fans, but supply others with a brisk, satisfying , though likely soon forgotten, read.

After reading this book, I had to re-read the editorial hype in disbelief. Anyone who can't tell where Chandler left off and Parker took over is blind. Philip Marlowe was certainly an inspiration for Parker's Spenser character, so you'd expect some similarities, even if they were written by two different authors. But in this book, Marlowe does both a time-warp and a personality transformation right around Chapter Four, so that by the end of the story he walks and talks and acts like a wisecracking private eye from modern Boston - the only character that Parker seems able to write well. As if that's not bad enough, Marlowe appears to quit smoking somewhere in the middle, and he and his wife end with the same can't-live-with-you, can't-live-without-you relationship (we can still be lovers! she cheerfully declares after asking for a divorce) that is at the heart of the Spenser and Susan novels. Susan Silverman has a lot of complicated reasons to settle for less than a traditional marriage, but Mrs. Marlowe doesn't. The mystery isn't too bad if you like lots of lurid sex and murder, but it doesn't justify the sloppy writing. The end is unsatisfying because the baddest guy of all not only gets away, but gets Marlowe's assistance because, again like Spenser, he's a sucker for a nice woman in love with her man - even if the man is a scumbag. All in all, unless you're a serious fan and HAVE to read everything Parker has written (in other words, unless you're doomed like me), I'd recommend reading Chandler if you like Chandler, and Parker if you like Parker. Mixing them produced a foul smell.

Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, Poodle Springs (Putnam, 1989)

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. ** 1/2

This is a novel mostly written by Robert Parker, drawing on four chapters started by Raymond Chandler at the end of his life. If you are looking for a great Marlowe story done just like the early ones, you will be disappointed. If you are glad to have one more chance to be with Marlowe, I think you will be pleased with the experience.

The story is a natural for Parker, because it involves Marlowe getting married to a rich society woman on the spur of the moment. Having gotten together, they both realize that not all is right in this relationship. 'Can't live with him, can't live without him' could have been the title. The relationship raises a lot of the kinds of issues that Parker handles well in the Spenser stories between he and Susan.

Marlowe keeps at his detective work, and we get to meet a whole cast of hard characters with wonderfully terse dialogue and understatement. Although not as tough as a Chandler, it is certainly tough in an appealing Parkerish way.

Having grown up in Southern California in the 1950s, I could relate to the tale that Chandler/Parker have woven. It seemed to fit my memory of those times, and had a sort of smoky, boozy nostalgia attached to it.

Give it a try. The first five chapters are only about 26 pages. You'll have a good sense whether or not you want to read more. I know I could not have possibly put it down at that point. I was hooked. Maybe you will be, too. I hope it will be irresistible for you as well.

Poodle Springs is Robert B. Parker's completion of a novel started by Raymond Chandler before he died in 1959 featuring private detective Philip Marlow. While I have read some of Chandler's previous novels featuring Marlow I have no emotional attachment to the character so I come with a blank slate in terms of evaluating whether Parker lives up to Chandler's character. Frankly I thought Parker did a fabulous job with the novel. It is a rather straightforward, gritty mystery, and a well done one at that. The tricky part is the unlikely event of Marlowe's being married to Linda Loring ne Potter (what her last name really is was a bit confusing to me, except she is now Mrs. Marlowe in this novel).

In this novel Marlowe is living in the plush community of Poodle Springs with his very wealthy wife instead of his usual gritty haunts in Los Angeles. He is hired to find a man who has skipped out on a $100,000 IOU from an illegal gambling establishment. It turns out the fellow is leading a double life involving pornography and blackmail and has gotten himself way over is head. Marlowe, intrepid as ever, chases him down in a nicely twisted plot. While doing this Marlowe has to deal with his rich wife's unhappiness over his continuing to be a private eye when he could live a life of leisure and spend time with her. But that he can't do or he wouldn't be Philip Marlowe anymore. The story revolved more around the case than Marlowe's marriage to Linda but Parker does a great job of blending it in. Frankly, I think this is one of the better novels Parker has written.

My only complaint about the novel is that we really never get to know Linda very well at all. Her mannerisms come off as a spoiled rich debutante but she is clearly not that. But we don't really ever know where she is coming from or get to know her. I suspect that Parker had plenty to work with to flesh out Marlowe's actions but had absolutely nothing to go on as to how Chandler envisioned developing Linda's character. So, my speculation is, in deference to Chandler he didn't try to flesh her character out too much but just left her pretty much like he found her. She comes off as a real swell gal.

Overall, on pure enjoyment, I highly recommend it.

My apologies in advance, but this is an "on the one hand/on the other hand" review. On the one hand, for anyone who loves Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, as I do, it is great to have a new story featuring the "Galahad of the Gutter", even if Chandler only wrote the first three chapters. And Robert B. Parker ( of Spenser fame) does a competent job of completing the story.

On the other hand, despite the exception of Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, I think that the modern trend of giving private eyes buddies and girlfriends has been a catastrophic development for the hard boiled novel. The very essence of these novels, epitomized in The Maltese Falcon, Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer series and the other Philip Marlowe stories, is the independence and accompanying vulnerability of the detectives. So this Marlowe story, which finds him married to a wealthy heiress and comfortably ensconced in Poodle Springs (a thinly veiled Pal Springs), is disappointing evidence that even a master of the genre was drifting in this direction when he died.

The mystery here is vintage Chandler, with blackmail, pornography, polygamy and the like and when the focus turns to Marlowe working on the case it is quite good. But the scenes between him and his wife, particularly the tensions between them as a result of his insistence on a return to detecting, bring the story to a screeching halt every time it builds up a head of steam.

The result is a very mixed bag and an extremely tentative recommendation--an airplane book.

GRADE: C

The decision by Chandler to wed Marlowe was better left unwritten, and, I feel, represented the loneliness and increasing malaise that he experienced late in his life. Robert Parker's novel felt forced and contrived. He tried too hard to incorporate and utilize the vernacular that Chandler was famous for. I was unsatisfied and disappointed by this. To me, it read like so many other books written in the "style" of other authors, such as "Scarlett", or "Mrs. DeWinter". No one can truly speak the words of Raymond Chandler (or Mitchell and DuMaurier). This book should have been left in the abandoned integrity of the first four chapters.

"Poodle Springs" is not Raymond Chandler's best work. It is not Robert B. Parker's best work, either. It doesn't quite have the edge of the usual Marlowe, or the wit of the usual Spenser.

Having said that, Chandler and Parker are both quite talented and capable authors. Either of them could make a cereal box interesting! So you could do a lot worse than spend a few hours with "Poodle Springs." It is a quick, fun read. The mystery itself is not mind-bending, but it does keep you guessing for a while.

I would have given the book four stars, such is my respect for both authors. However, a pet peeve. Parker fans are, no doubt, well aware of Parker's penchant for angst-filled relationships, where the parties love each other desperately - even perfectly - but cannot live together. And forget being married! In Parker's world, marriage risks crushing the vibrant soul of the hero every time. This was an interesting theme, maybe, when Parker first explored it with Spenser and Susan Silverman.

But since then, he has included it in every book series he's touched. The pattern is the same every time, and it has gotten quite tedious. As annoyed as I was to see it reappear in the Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone novels, at least those series are purely Parker's domain to use as he wishes to explore his marriage issues. But to impose his peculiar hangup on Chandler's work here in "Poodle Springs" is to, I think, overstep his bounds. And I say this as a devoted Parker fan who owns every one of his books.

The heirs of Raymond Chandler, one of the most imitated writers of all time, approached Parker, an obvious disciple of the master, to finish an incomplete manuscript the deceased author left behind. This was a tough assignment: The story was begun when Chandler was past his prime, his habitual alcohol abuse having taken it's toll on his creative powers. There was no plot to speak of, just a few initial chapters, with Chandler's writing sounding like a maudlin parody of his earlier work. Still, the talent was there, and the playfulness and wit had not died out completely, in spite of all else. And like Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe is too good to let him fade away just because his initial author has passed on. So Parker had to finish someone else's novel, with someone else's style and someone else's protagonist, in another place and time that wasn't his own. And he did a remarkable job - funny, witty, and as true to the original as the first five chapters that were given him would allow. It's a period piece that re-creates the decadent world of Marlowe's California, with a nod or two to contemporary tastes for violence and sexual content. So once you understand the obstacles, you can appreciate the result even more...a fun novel that stands on it's own as a parody and as a hard-boiled romp through old L.A., and a chance to spend some time with a much-missed thick-skinned soft-hearted galahad of the golden state, after a long goodbye.

Even if you're not a Raymond Chandler fan this is a book to avoid. The plot is childish, derivative, and tedious, one that you're seen or read a million times before, and the characters are drawn entirely from nearly identical characters in earlier Marlowe books. The relationship between Marlowe and his rich wife is grotesque. Chandler was already at the end of his powers when he started this book in 1959 (see his previous book, "Playback", to see how far he had already fallen), and the first four chapters written by him are sadly forced and inept. If anything, Parker does a better job of writing once he takes over but what he has to work with is hopeless. His major problem is that he can't make the reader believe that this story is actually taking place in the late 50's or, possibly, early 60's. 1990 attitudes intrude, probably unconsciously, and it is obvious at all times that Parker is trying to write the equivalent of a historical novel without actually telling the reader that it *is* a historical novel. Skip this book and go read "Farewell, My Lovely" or "The Long Goodbye".