The Wife Caper-With Raymond Chandler And Robert Parker’s Poodle Springs In Mind 

By Sam Lowell

Yeah, I am back again, me your favorite real life detective, Ray Robertson out of Riverdale not too far outside of Boston. I say favorite real life P.I., my preferred term for my profession since others call us keyhole peepers, shamuses, gumshoes, stalkers, grifters, midnight shifters, and general fuck-ups, because just a short while back I went on a rampage about how all the glamour of the fictional private eyes in books and movies is so much noise in the dead of night. That time it was over a re-reading (probably for the tenth time if not more from the dog-eared look of the thing when I dusted it off) of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (and its film adaptation under the name Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell in the original version as Philip Marlowe Chandler’s most famous creation). This time it is over a piece of writing, I don’t what else to call it, in which the late great private detection writer Robert Parker, remember the Spenser series a while back, took over at the request of the Estate of Raymond Chandler finishing up writing a story not finished (hell only four chapters were done) when he passed away in 1959.

The thing that got my goat was that Parker, or maybe it was Chandler had an older if not wiser Marlowe, married, married for Christ sake.  A guy, a lone wolf, a loner, a “love them and leave them” kind of guy with the dames when he was on the case, and later too. Hell, I knew from page one that the thing was going to fall on its face, that this was not a marriage made in heaven no matter how good-looking the doll was from the description and a look at the cover art of the front of the book. Why, well I have had two, count them, two marriages which both ended in divorce…and alimony, no child support because no kids. The reasons for the divorces by those dissatisfied wives given here in liberal Massachusetts mental cruelty meaning nothing but the cold hard fact that working on cases took up plenty of my time, time not spent on them, time with empty beds which they nevertheless were able to fill in my absence although I didn’t squawk since they cut me some slack, or my lawyer got them to cut me some slack on the alimony when he confronted them with a little adultery charge. So you see why I am on the warpath, again.                     

Maybe I had better go back over some of the stuff I said in that last screed if I can find my notes.  Yeah, here goes, here is what I said:

“Whatever you do don’t let anybody kid you that the life of a real life private detective, shamus, gumshoe, keyhole peeper, private dick or the thousand one other names I have been called in my life is anything like you see on film, or the television or what you read in those paperback books with the lurid covers showing a some half-naked broad and some steely-eyed guy going round and round. And if anybody asks you why I said that then just tell them Ray Robertson (Raymond on my Riverdale Police Department-issues license but Ray to clients and friends alike) a guy who has been on the mean streets of private detection for the past twenty years told you the skinny, told you true, told you in twenty years he never had a case that was close to all that fiction jazz.    

“Like a lot of P.I.s (my preferred name from my profession but you call it what you will) I started out in the service, in the Army, as Military Police, an MP in the mid-1970s after I got out of high school but that was mostly breaking up Saturday night fights at the Enlisted Men’s Club and traffic accidents some caused by that same Saturday drunk business. After I got out I tried to get on the Staties here in Massachusetts but didn’t make the grade on the written test to go forward in the training. So I latched onto a job with the Gloversville Police which wasn’t as exacting. I did that for a five years until they got themselves a new chief who was all show and who didn’t want to tackle the cocaine problem that was growing in the town (not just the drug itself but the B&Es, the robberies, the A&Bs those clowns did to get their dope money from honest citizens).

“So I left and good riddance. They still have a drug problem in that town but now it is heroin. After taking a couple of courses to catch up on stuff I applied for and got my P.I. license from the Riverdale Police. I grabbed a small office in the old Lawrence Lowell factory building by the river for the cheap rent since the place was seriously in need of repair but I figured anybody who needed my services was not worried about the building décor or the plain desk, two chairs and a couple of wooden file cabinets that had been left behind when the mill went under. Let me tell you this once I got my license unlike the stuff you see and hear the Chief told me straight out that he never wanted to hear word one about me messing with anything that even smelled like it involved a police matter, even trying to fix a parking ticket. You know what though the Chief who is still at it although he is close to retirement now could have saved his breathe because I never even stumbled on as much as a fixed parking ticket in the past twenty years and I have had plenty of cases to keep me going.    

“Sure I read all those books, those paperback detective books that I was telling you about before with the half-naked broads and brawny P.Is. And I have re-read them, one recently that I want to tell you about since that particular book is why I am on my high-horse today. I don’t know about the academic part, about where these guys stood in over-all literature but I heard they stood pretty high. I’m talking about Dashiell Hammett, the commie writer who took the fall for Joe Stalin back in the 1950s and spent a few months in jail and Raymond Chandler who didn’t start writing detective stuff until later in his life, sold insurance of something before. Those guys who best work was before my time, way before, back in the 1930s and 1940s at least that seems to have been when they did their best work. had a way of putting a story together that kept me reading until I was done, finished and then I would re-read it again. That was why I wanted to be a cop, a guy who solved the ugly problems of the world. Maybe too like Chandler’s Marlowe I was tilting at windmills myself. Like I said I believed that was what being a cop was about-fixing the ills of society as best you could.    

“Like I said every once on a while I get on a kick to re-read those guys and so one night after having been on the road all day trying to find out the whereabouts of a guy who had skipped out on his alimony payments and the irate wife though he might be in Providence where he had grown up hanging around his mother’s house (he wasn’t I never did find him, or didn’t find him before the wife said the hell with him it wasn’t worth the money she was paying me to keep tabs on him) I was too dogged to do any paperwork on that case so I grabbed an old moth-eaten frayed copy of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, the paperback edition with that fetching red-headed doll with her dress half off her shoulder and a snub-nosed gun in her hand that wouldn’t scare a ten year old kid, a guy on the ground looking very dead and felt-hatted Marlowe with hands up like he was heading for the bastinado. Naturally once I settled into my bed in my studio apartment after having a good stiff drink, the first and last of the day I read the whole thing through again, this maybe the tenth time I had read it since I was a kid.”        

So you know I know the ropes, know what reads or looks real and what is hokum. Let me run this story, this Poodle Spring storyline by you and make a few comments on the way to show why I was onto the whole deal from about page one, the whole deal about their marriage which had a lot to do with why I thing Marlowe flubbed the case, why too many people wound up face down for no good reason, too much satin sheet, way too much.

You knew straight up once you found out the locale Marlowe and the Mrs., this dish named Linda who had more money that Midas from her old man who made it, well, perhaps its better left said how he made it although Marlowe must have had his sneaking suspicions since he had been around the block enough to know when big, big money is involved there is dirt around it, plenty of dirt. So he and she are settled into swanky dig out in the desert out in the gated community Poodle Springs which tells you right away that the closest they come to serious crime is when some house servant steals the family china and silverware. To my mind this is mistake number one since Marlowe was always associated with the scumbag slumming streets of Los Angeles, a city boy with city sensibilities wasted out in Mayfair swell Western branch country. From the beginning he makes it clear to Linda that he is his own man, he will work his old job and will not be kept although usually he said that before she gave him some come hither bedroom look. She, Linda, for her part had no plan to drop down in class, settle in among the sleaze balls Marlowe usually ran across and so there was a running battle between the two with Marlowe wilting a little once he got the scent of jasmine in his head.      

Working man Marlowe, spending his own dough, finds an office in town that was probably more low rent than the joint he had in that run-down section of Bunker Hill in L.A. That will show old Linda. Of course he hardly was ever there since he was even before having an opening ceremony got waylaid into a case, a case that I would not have touched for the love of money. A casino owner, really a front man for the guy who was backing the operation, needed help getting a connected high-roller who lost big at the tables to collect an I.O.U. that the real boss wanted taken care of. First of all no way should Marlowe have even considered the deal since the cops, the Riverdale real life cops frown upon P.Is. doing work for hoods, you know, mobsters. Yeah, I know Marlowe in the old days did nothing but come up against those crumb bums but now that he was on easy street he should have tipped his oars. Second you never, never wind up collecting off an I.O.U. you either have to waste the guy or let it go. Hell even trying to strong arm a guy for loan repayments on those Sunday football games is like going to war.           

Of course we are out in swell-ville there is more to it since the guy who owes the dough, a second-rate questionable taste photographer Les is married to another Mayfair swell dame, and so the deal will be dicey no matter how you look at. So Marlowe charges forward. First off this guy Les’ wife turns out to be kind of kinky, liked to show her wares for all to see which is how Les grabbed her; grabbed the brass ring. Problem: Les under the name Larry is already married, yeah he is an unembarrassed bigamist, who in his own seedy just tried to catch his own brass ring and work out some risk addiction ideas in his psyche. Her father didn’t like the situation of her marrying Les but he had his own hang-ups about his daughter, some incestuous stuff.    

Bigamy, welshing on gambling debts, hell, grabbing for brass ring all would have been in a day’s if the bodies didn’t start to pile up while Marlowe was shacked up. Hey, one time my first wife, Lorna, a good-looking woman who somehow fell for me who, truth is just and average looking guy were having a little bounce around vacation for three freaking days and in those three days the guy I was supposed to be watching ripped off seven cars from the lot of Jimmy Jay’s Auto, the guy who hired to find out what the hell was going on with his inventory. It turned out to be an inside job, an inside job with a well-known car thief, Lenny Ross, on the outside stealing everything that had an engine, or maybe even just a starter as I learned later when the P.I. who wound up cracking the case put the screws on. So don’t tell me a dame, a good-looking dame who gives you the eye and you follow like a puppy dog didn’t help Marlowe fall down on the job here.         

Yeah, fell down on the job because whatever his errant attitude toward the backdoor sleaze pornographic photographer the heat was creeping up on him, on Les/Larry and he was built for fair weather and no heavy lifting. See he was being blackmailed by some frail who had the goods on his kinky rich second wife (and whom he had photographed along with some more subsequently famous women boffo as well, you know in the buff, nude okay). And that frail wound up very dead in Les/Larry’s office. Guess who found her very dead. Yeah, Marlowe. Guess who also wound up dead, Lippy. Guess who found him. Yeah, Marlowe. So you know Marlowe while he is being carped to death by Linda about his working habits lost sight of the ball and he would take some heat from the coppers who still don’t like gumshoes messing in their nice set-up murder cases. Don’t want shamuses within a hundred miles of such work, and frankly no real private eye has the resources, manpower, or interest in such cases especially if they are married. Too much time away from the love nest, I found that out the hard way when my second wife, Bonnie, not as good-looking as my first wife who but knew her way around the bedroom took up a lover in that same bedroom when I was away on a skip trance case for six weeks.

Of course Marlowe, to his credit was silent to the cops about who might have killed the pair since he figured rightly Les/Larry was not build for such heavy duty. It turned out that that kinky wife whose father had some kind of incestuous hold over her had done the deed since she loved her Les/Larry no matter what kind of heel his was. In the end though she went over the edge killing her father and tried to do so to anybody else who might get in the way. Too late for her father his bodyguard wasted her. So there was more carnage than in a war by the time the gun smoke cleared. All which could have been avoided except maybe that first one, the blackmailer since that came out of the blue even though Marlowe had her number, had been following her. And Les/Larry?  Marlowe a romantic at heart like in the old days, the old knight errant let him and that first wife walk off into the sunset.       

In the end Marlowe let Linda slip through his fingers, went back to his righteous Hollywood, a back to his old run-down office in that run-down building in that run-down Bunker Hill section of L.A. but he could have had her and have skipped the body count if he had not been in a trance about that jasmine scent she threw off. Damn dames.