What Goes Around Comes Around-With Crime Novelist Robert B. Parker In Mind- A Private Investigator Phil Larkin Sketch

By Zack James

 

Hey, Phil Larkin, Private Investigator, here, and if you can believe it, I have been, me Phil Larkin have been “conned” by Zack James into doing a book review of all things. Me, a guy who just snuck through by high school by the skin of my teeth, a guy whose biggest literary efforts in the past have been centered around writing alimony and child support checks for two ex-wives and four not ex-children (two and two, boys and girls, and two by each ex-spouse if anybody is asking). Miss Sonos, my old bat of an English teacher at Riverdale High senior year, who practically brow-beat me to death to get me to write a one page story must be turning over in her grave at the thought of me reading a book never mind reviewing one.

I will just say here that Zack, not a bad guy but clueless about the real private detection business having read as far as I can tell too many Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane crime novels and it has shown in his own reviews, had promised me that if I wrote something up he would be more than glad to edit it-the best he could. With that proviso (you know this is his word, so right away you know he is already editing, editing like crazy) I have  agreed to review a book by Robert Parker, a crime detection novelist who after I read some of his stuff also read way too much Chandler and Hammett, I don’t know about Spillane. By the way, the book is kind of by Robert Parker okay as I will explain in a minute.   

How I got “conned” into this caper is kind of interesting. See one time when Zack and I were sitting down at Jack Harris’ Bar over on Norfolk Street in Gloversville where Zack has a small office across the street from the bar he mentioned that this guy Robert B. Parker wrote crime novels, good ones he said in the tradition of Chandler and Hammett.  Immediately I was ready to get on my “high horse” about these crime story writers who are clueless about the real deal, would turn to jelly if they came up against any real thugs like the ones they freely make up in their novels. More probably they would die of boredom if they followed a real private investigator like me getting hassled doing “repo” work, chasing after missing housewives who want to stay missing and “dunning” guys for banks and credit card companies on any given day.   

This “realism” crusade I have been on for a long time, probably as long as I have been in the business myself, about twenty years now. Zack had almost literally to hold me back for a minute when he mentioned Parker and his profession knowing my low toleration for these cheapjack writers who write big hardcover books for big money and who just make the stuff up, fantasy stuff. Like I said already, but it bears repeating, they would pee all over themselves if they had to deal with a serious private investigation matter. Would cry “Uncle” and worse if they ran up again just one surly working-class deadbeat husband ready to kick you in the groin or some unmentionable place when you are looking for him for that hard ass child support check or trying to “repo” a car when some thug is ready to cut you with a knife, a sharp knife, just for suggesting that you were going to take his “baby” away despite the three months behind in his payments that would allow you to do so legally. Yeah they would definitely die of boredom if they knew the “skinny” knew how really tedious 99.9% of the work is-and no off-hand sex in the bargain either. Jesus do I look like a guy who ever came across a situation where I was ripping off a piece from some “missing” woman to keep her missing. Give me a break, more likely she would have a small hand grenade with the grip pulled.     

This Parker, Robert B. Parker, a guy whose name I didn’t know at the time since as far as crime detection novelists go, I had only read Chandler, Hammett, maybe a little Spillane when I was a kid like lots of kids, then re-read some of their stuff later when I was starting out as a P.I. after I quit the public cops over in Riverdale. Get this I quit after I wouldn’t play ball with the police chief and mayor when Mister Big in town was looking to squash a manslaughter rap after he killed his young, very young woman companion, not his wife, in a car accident when he was cold-stone drunk as a skunk. So I would read those authors to see if they had anything to help me out. Help me hold off a guy with a screwdriver ready to do serious bodily harm when I finally found him under a rock and asked him if maybe he should go back to the wife and kids and stop hanging with the hooker that he had met as some low rent bar. Stuff like that not running into some rich girl sisters looking for kicks, looking for some big goof’s Velma who didn’t want to be found and had the wherewithal to stay unfound. I found out as good as they were as literary detectives (Zack’s term, okay) they didn’t know jack about the real thing. And, Jesus, Hammett had worked for the “Pinkies,” Pinkertons.

So Zack said this Parker was the cat’s meow, had been, before he passed away several years before the night we meet at Jack Harris.’ Zack said Parker was the “heir” or something to Chandler and Hammett. Sold plenty of big expensive hardback book at primo prices for few words and lots of shooting off the cuff. Had his characters played on the screen, mostly television, from what Zack said but I would have missed all that. Mostly I have for a long time refused to watch anything but sports on television and maybe every once in a while some old black and white crime detection stuff, film noir stuff they call it now. You know Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Clueless guys but interesting except old Sam allowed himself to almost wind up taking the big step off himself when he let some twist with evil designs on a magic bird get under his skin and Marlowe almost wound up as the doormat after letting a couple of wild sisters let their jasmine scent get in the way of business.

So Parker followed in the big steps of those guys, especially Chandler. Get this-wound up being asked by Raymond Chandler’s estate, if you can believe that since Chandler died in 1959, to finish up a piece of writing that Chandler had started before he died but never finished, a Philip Marlowe story so it figured to sell a billion copies even if it was nothing but where Parker thought Chandler might heading with the thing. A book that Chandler had called Poodle Spring, a place where the rich hung out in the desert in Southern California. Nice work if you can get it. One night at Jack’s Zack mentioned that they had a copy of that book in the Gloversville Public Library and that maybe if I had some time I should read the thing, see what I thought. See if Parker via Chandler was as clueless about the profession as the older guys. Zack played to my vanity with that comment he thought I am sure. The book must have been popular because it took me a couple of months to finally get it from the library. I read it over a couple of nights like I used to do when I was a kid and got hopped up on reading Chandler and Hammett late at night under the covers.   

A couple of weeks later I ran into Zack at Jack’s and mentioned that I had read the book, this Poodle Spring, this “late” Chandler he called it. Zack offered to buy me a drink, maybe a couple I forget, some high shelf whiskey so I know he meant business, if I would sit down with him and tell him what I thought of the thing. See he was writing one of those endless book reviews that he thrives on in between bumps in the road in his real profession, a lawyer, a good one too if you are in deep trouble with the law around Riverdale. And a lot of people are. So that night I gave him my impressions, mostly kind of a sad-eyed think through since old Philip Marlowe in Parker’s hands had lost a step or seven.

I won’t bore you with all the details of the book, of what we talked about that night, but I will give some of the highlights because they will lead the way into how Zack conned me into this book review business. Like I said this book is late Marlowe not the young crusader chasing after every skirt in town like in The Big Sleep, grabbing dames and gangsters with every hand, but an older, more mature guy, a guy who like a lot of us wound up getting married when he got older after he decided he had to slow down a bit, couldn’t keep the hours and assignations (that’s Zack’s word mind is “hitting the satin sheets,” sex okay) like in the old days. Got some dish and from all reports she was a dish, and rich too so that was a plus. Lived in splendor in that Poodle Springs of the title that must have been just like it sounded, poodles, perfume and pansies.

But how did that set-up figure as the life for a guy like Marlowe, a rough-hewn mass of manhood who cut his teeth on adventure and solving other people’s messes, running after windmills when the deal went down. So naturally out in “no tell” town he ran up against a buzz-saw of hellish incidents. Got involved in a crazy case that would have been swept under the rug in the real leafy wealthy suburbs. In the real world of real money, hell, even just the so-so rich he would have been run off the thing so fast he wouldn’t have time to pack his bags. Probably if he had done half the stuff he did in this story he would have been face-down in some desert arroyo working as fodder for the vultures. And the good citizens of Poddle-ville would have chuckled for a minute and then headed for the polo matches.

See old Marlowe ran into a guy who was playing the bigamy game-one of whose wives was nothing but waitress serving them off the arm the other who was a friend of that jet-set wife of his, oh yeah, and an off-hand homicidal maniac when she didn’t get her way- had this awful father fixation (incestuous feelings-Zack). Let me back up a minute though and a give few details. This dish Marlowe married, Linda, Linda of the ton of money was a dame that he knew for a while before they decided to get hitched. So she knew what Marlowe was like and he in turn knew that she was just a frothy piece of breeze spending Papa’s dough on nice clothes and fresh sheets. It was not going to work, no way but it took a while to figure that out, took a body count as you might have expected. Let’s put it this way this Linda figured to spend the days planning for the next cocktail party and Marlowe was figuring he could make some easy dough working the key-hole peeping circuit.           

But Poodle Springs or Hell’s Kitchen when people are looking for kicks, you know, gambling, sex, dope and their off-shoots some “connected” guy is hovering in the background ready, willing and able to provide the action, to grease the skids. No sooner did Marlowe hits the streets of gold town then he got a job, hell, a “repo” job if you think about it. Some guy was into the local Mister Big (he had a name but I forgot, besides Mister Big gives you all you need to know about such guys who talk funny and shoot straight, or have somebody do it) for 100 big ones and he was having trouble collecting. Marlowe nabbed the job, or else. Then all hell broke loose because like I said the bodies started to pile up, including Mister Big’s. See that guy who owed the dough was the “pet,” the “husband” of the daughter one of the local big money guys. This Muffy, figures right, was nothing but poison but she loved her two-timing man. Loved him enough to let that stack of bodies get pretty high. And got wasted by our boy in the end, and her Papa took a hit too. Marlowe figured the whole thing out but let’s face it in real poodle-town the bodies don’t get stacked up, everything goes under the rug if there is enough cash changing hands. Of course he and the wife split, agreed to be friends with privileges if I read the thing right.   

Yeah, I admit it was fast-paced story, a quick read and told Zack the same. That’s when he hoodwinked me into this Parker caper. He played the old “turnabout is fair play” maneuver on me. See Parker when he in turn died left a bunch of stuff unfinished, left stuff some up and coming next generation of crime detection novelist could come up and finish. Some clueless young crime novelist who whether or not he or she was influenced by Chandler or Hammett could fake out about thugs and shoots-outs and murder most foul with bodies being stacked pretty high by the last sagging page. Parker, like I said, well, like Zack who after all has time for such stuff, won his spurs in the crime detection story racket with a semi-Marlowe (Zack’s term okay, I am not semi anything I am all or nothing, the hell with semi okay) guy named Spenser (like the old time English poet-Zack). That isn’t the book I reviewed though. The one Zack had me snag was by some old three named Yankee, I guess, Reed Farrell Coleman, who finished up Parker’s The Devil Wins.

Get this though. This one is not even about the at least honest profession of private detection but about the public cops, and not even a sideways regular beat cop or nose-to-the-grindstone bureau detective but a police chief, a guy named Jesse Stone. And not about the slumming streets of Los Angles, San Francisco or Boston but some North Shore of Boston leafy suburb, a place called Paradise. Which turned out not to be Eden when the bodies started piling up to the rafters. I was ready after about page three to chuck the whole thing, to toss the thing into the flames since anybody who knows anything about small town life is that other than rolling up the sidewalk after dark nothing like some wholesale discovery of long buried bodies and then more bodies to cover up the details of how those bodies got there is going to upset the evening’s television watching. Otherwise property values would go down so low people would think they were in Detroit. As I was ready to heave though I thought that Zack would just “con” me into another book probably with an even more improbable plotline. So I held my nose and waded through the thing.

Held my nose was the right way to approach this one. See this big winter storm, a northeaster which blow like hell in the East, providentially (Zack, right) brought forth three bodies, two long gone and one recently butchered, seemingly unrelated. Not so since the two long gone bodies, twenty five years really were those of two young Catholic school girls who had been missing all that time and who subsequently after autopsy had been found to have been murdered. Jesse had his antenna up. Third body, long and tall, was of a man.

The connection: the new body had knowledge of who, of what parties, had murdered those young not so innocent girls long ago who, well at least one of them, was into “doing the do.” Sex okay nice Catholic school girl or not. That long tall description was the giveaway for me. See early on Chief Stone was naturally in trouble from the local political establishment because they did not want to see their leafy Eden fall down to the level of some crime capital of the world and have those precious property values go below those of Detroit. The only one to back up his investigative efforts was a councilman who was a former captain of the basketball team. Bingo he did it, him and a couple of his buddies on the team. So this weak-kneed witness had to go. And of course when the heat was on, when this drunken sot of a public cop got close to figuring him as the fall guy he got panicky and he had to off those buddies and anybody else who could be linked to those murders. An easy solve for old Jesse but I had it scoped way before him because anybody could tell you that you can never trust a basketball player, never. And always trust that stupid high school students in general will go off the deep end when sex is involved.                

Jesus after reading this one I am praying for Robert B. Parker to resurrect. Better for Chandler with his slumming streets angels and Hammett with his bang-bang shoot ‘em up characters to come roaring back to life.