The Life And Times Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator -Trouble Is Still My Business –Preface  And Introduction    

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman- with kudos to Raymond Chandler

 

Preface by Zack James

 

If you get one thing right in this wicked old world, or the literary segment of the beast, or better, the crime novel sub-segment  (okay, okay genre) you know that one Michael Philip Marlin’s business was trouble, trouble pure and simple. And sisters and brothers while you are getting that right you had best put it down that trouble, trouble with a capital T added, was this classic hard-boiled private detective Marlin’s business through thick and thin, no question. We have previously followed old school Marlin through thick and thin in the many short sketches that make up this collection.

 

Our intrepid private eye, private dick, shamus, gumshoe or whatever you call a guy that, privately, and for too little dough scraped off other people’s dirt, and did it not badly at that, in your neighborhood. And kept his code of honor intact, well mostly intact, as he, for example, tried to spare an old man some anguish, some wild daughters anguish, or tried to find gigantic Moose’s Verna, Verna, sweet Verna who did not want to be found, not by Moose anyway, or find some foolish wayward daughter despite his client’s ill-winded manners. And on it went.

 

Oh yah, about Frank Jackman, about the guy who wrote this selection of short Marlin sketches. Like I said in another review he, following along in the train of Brother Raymond Chandler and Brother Dashiell Hammett has attempted to turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime fighters and high-tech wizards masquerading as detectives that dominate the reading market these days on its head and gives us tough guy blood and guts detectives we can admire, can get behind, warts and all.

 

[Hammett, the author of The Thin Man, and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade, maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Chandler the prodigious creator of the Philip Marlowe series of novels and short stories. Sam and Marlowe, who come to think of it like Marlin, also had judgment problems when it came to women, women wearing that damn perfume that stops a man, even a hard-boiled detective man cold, in Marlowe’s case an assortment of Hollywood women and Sam’s a frill who was looking for the stuff of dreams up north in Frisco town.]

 

In Jackman’s case he has drawn strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlin’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlin was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them, one of the frails as he called them in private, himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlin’s eyes. Or noticing a frayed collar or a misshapen dress that indicated that a guy or gal was on cheap street and just maybe not on the level, maybe scratching like crazy for his or her coffee and cakes.

 

The list of such descriptive language goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly, old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown buildings on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down on your fragile head. (That spill your guts thing, by the way a trait that our Marlin seemed organically incapable of doing, except when it suited his purposes. No cop or gangster could force anything out of him, and they tried, believe me they tried. ) He had come from them, from the cops, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.

 

At the same time Jackman is a master of setting the barebones detail of the space Marlin had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He had a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses reflecting old wealth California, mostly in the south where he plied his trade. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high-ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

 

But where Jackman has made his mark is in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Los Angeles Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo- men, the penny- ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Jackman knows the type, has the type down solid.

 

Nor is Jackman above putting a little social commentary in Marlin’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back east looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlin’s code of honor.

 

And of course over a series of sketches Jackman has expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he had honed back in the 1930s. Yes, Marlin the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlin the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some serious Obamacare health insurance- no questions asked . Yah, Marlin.

I like to think that one Michael Philip Marlin who worked out of Ocean City just south of Los Angeles back then now incorporated into the vast city had many of Marlowe’s attributes-and Chandler’s too.

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Introduction To The Stories by Frank Jackman  

 

I have been on a Philip Marlowe run of late, mainly re-reading Raymond Chandler’s major crime novels from the 1930s and 1940s in trying to think about the work of the well-known private detective-Michael Philip Marlin. Many of Marlin’s attributes parallel those of Marlowe’s so it was beneficial to run through those novels that feature the hard- drinking, bonded whiskey-neat drinking not that Hollywood dry martini sissy stuff, hat-wearing, rakishly tilted to hide those roving eyes when he wants them hidden, tough guy, tough enough no to be afraid to throw a punch or take one, take a slug or fire one, windmill-chasing especially if that structure has a foxy woman hanging off one of the blades, seen-it-all, acres of dope, rivers of booze, seven kinds of sex, maybe more, that would make the guy who wrote the Kama Sutra  blush, every day, every  average day corruption and murder, murder in all shapes and sizes, none pretty private detective.

 

Those novels ranging from The Big Sleep to Payback (seven in all) also pretty much tell the story of Marlowe’s many bouts with the bad guys (and gals) of the world down in sunny Los Angeles before it exploded after World War II into a big time town. A time long ago when a man (or woman) could know that city, that slumming city and its high and low life without a map. That had been Marlin’s time and place as well. Those novels also developed Marlowe’s trademark approaches to things, his forever chasing after some rough justice in this wicked old world, his fly-by-the-seat-of-the pants code of honor that sometimes went awry on him, usually when helping a dame (twist, frail frill, chick, femme whatever they were called in your neighborhood), a dame in trouble usually but not always, always playing by his own rules though, and not afraid to take a bump or two, or a slug or two, for a client.  

 

 

What a lot of people don’t know, including if you can believe this, Philip Marlowe since he passed away in 1959 before he could have heard the news was that Michael Philip Marlin got married, married to Fiona Fallon, one of his flames from a caper back in the late 1940s, secretly married, well, not secretly so much as quietly since any wife of his would be in some danger from bad guys (or maybe an irate ex-flame) if that knowledge was widely available on those steamy Southern California streets. And that marriage produced a child, a male child, Tyrone, born in 1946, whom Marlin took on his knee when he was young and told stories to about old Los Angeles and the characters that ran amok there.  Marlin passed away in 1976 having retired from the gumshoe business some years before. Shortly thereafter Tyrone started his own private eye business which he named the Tyrone Agency not trading in on his father’s famous name for obvious reasons.

 

Joshua Lawrence Breslin, a free-lance journalist out there in the west and a friend of my old friend Peter Paul Markin, had to do some business with Tyrone in the early 1980s, which he handled well, and they struck up something of a friendship, meeting every once in a while over drinks, whiskey, high-shelf bonded whiskey –neat no that sissy Hollywood dry martini stuff, and he would tell Joshua stories that his father had told him about the old days in wild LA. He also told Joshua about some of his own closed cases where some of what his father had spoken of to him helped him crack more than one case.

 

Joshua conveyed many of those same stories to Markin over many a flask at their favorite watering hole in Boston, Rick’s, who subsequently told many of them to me. I suggested to Markin that I might like to relate those stories to a wider audience. At first Tyrone bucked a little when Joshua made the suggestion since many of the old stories had already been published. Tyrone then suggested that if I changed up the stories enough and kept his father’s name out of it that it might work, work legally and work to keep the Michael Philip Marlin code of honor before a new reading public. Through negotiation Tyrone finally relented on the use of his father’s name since that would draw the audience I was interested in reaching. The stories below, in no particular order, are the result of those discussions between Tyrone and Joshua - with kudos to Raymond Chandler, and, well, Philip Marlowe too.