***Philip Marlowe-RIP-Raymond Chandler And Robert Parker’s Poodle Spring

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Poodle Springs, Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, Putnam, New York, 1989

No question when it comes to private eyes, dicks, gumshoes, peepers, shamuses or whatever you call guys (gals too these days) who take on people’s miseries for a few bucks and expenses and try to solve something that is bothering them then the classic windmill-chaser with his own rough-hewn code of honor, code of facing the world, Raymond Chandler’s seven-crime novel series star, Philip Marlowe, comes readily to mind. Then out of the blue (well maybe not out of the blue) some thirty years later we got an eighth crime novel starring the well-travelled literary and cinematic private detective.

What gives? Well, what gives was that the late well-regarded crime novel writer in his own right with the Spenser series, Robert Parker, decided to finish the incomplete novel, Poodle Spring, Chandler left behind when he died in 1959. And with some updated language, some new looks at Chandler’s slumming streets of Los Angeles (Poodle Spring is just a resting place for the rich characters who people the novel the real action is in the city of angels) and the same old vices, lusts, and virtues of the southern California sun does a creditable job.      

Here is a little twist though. Our boy Marlowe when he goes chasing windmills this time has a wife, a rich wife who slows him down, or tries to which is dangling in the background. See rich or poor Marlowe is who he is, has his code, is his own man. So the bridle of marriage is worn thinly, and eventually not at all. Yeah, a guy can’t chase windmills, save damsels in distress, and every other thing a private eye is expected to do for a hundred a day and lunch with all that baggage as tempting as it is. That little twist only slows the action a little though as Marlowe finds himself up to his neck in murder, duplicity, and greed.

Here is the skinny. A grifter porno photography trying to set himself on easy street marries into wealth (and hence easy street Palm, oops, Poodle Springs). Except there are two problems. First he is already married and secondly the rich gal he married is kinky, kinky but with a very rich shady past father who has a habit of fixing things for her. Of course every grifter has a trail behind him. Our boy Les/Larry (depending on which wife you ask) is being hounded by a former client who has some goods to sell (kinky photos of poor little rich wife). Not only that our boy is in hock to a gambler for a big IOU. Not good, not good at all when the blackmailer and gambler wind up very dead and Philip Marlowe has to figure out who killed them, or else. The “or else” being the very big and deadly reach of the rich girl’s father. Sound like a Chandler plot-line? Maybe not up to the Big Sleep but close, if our boy could just keep away from that rich wife’s bed for a while.