Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A fast, easy read, July 2, 2002
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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Philip Spenser, please stand up., April 23, 2002
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
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Marlowe Becomes Spenser, December 22, 2000
By A Customer
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.
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