Philip Marlowe-Redux- With Raymond
Chandler and Robert Parker’s Poodle Springs in Mind.
Book Review
By Lester Lannon
Poodle Springs, based on an
unfinished story by Raymond Chandler finished up by Robert Parker, Putnam and
Sons, New York, 1989
A while back, maybe a couple of years
ago now, back in 2013, 2014 somewhere around there Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris
at one of their increasingly frequent get-togethers courtesy of their then
recent respective retirement statuses got together to “chew the fat” about the
old days, the old days when they first met back in 1971 under unusual
circumstances and had found then that they had many interests in common. The
common interests in a moment but it is worthwhile since I lured the reader in
by that “unusual circumstances” of their initial meeting to once again explain
how both guys who came from different geographically areas but more importantly
different social and political perspectives bonded for a lifetime as a result.
To make a long story short they met
in jail, well, maybe jail is too strong a term but in detention, while being
detained. That 1971 date is important to explain why two basically law-abiding
young men (and subsequently too courting arrest only by choice) with very different
perspectives found themselves in Washington, D.C. on May Day of that year with
their respective groups trying to shut down the American government. Of course
that was Vietnam War times and a goodly number of people who were at wits end
about stopping that war and had come, rightly, under the sway of those who said
forever larger marches on Washington was not going to end the war and therefore
more direct action was necessary. Ralph, an embittered Vietnam veteran from
Troy, New York had gone with a group of fellow members of the Albany area Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (VVAW) with the idea of blocking the Pentagon
(somewhat along the lines of the “levitation” explained in Norman Mailer’s Armies Of The Night about an anti-war
action at that site in 1967 although practically speaking not one Vet expected
them to be able to actually shut down the site, not without serious bloodshed).
Sam, not a veteran due to a hardship exemption after his father died leaving
his mother and four younger sisters dependent on him, had become radicalized if
that was the right word after his best friend from high school in Carver down
in Southeastern Massachusetts, Jeff Mullins, had been killed in the Central
Highlands of Vietnam. Jeff had before he died in letters home begged Sam to
tell the world, the world that would listen anyway, the war was all wrong if he
did not make it back to do so himself. That spurred Sam on and he eventually
drifted up to Cambridge and joined one of the burgeoning radical direct action
collectives there, the John Brown Collective. Their collective’s task in
Washington was to try to shut down the White House which unlike the more
realistic veterans they fully expected to do with enough forces. In the event
neither man nor their respective groups even got close to achieving what they
had set out to do that early May Day Monday morning. All they, and thousands of
others, got for their efforts were batterings with police sticks, tear gas, and
trips to the bastinado by a counter-force of police and military who were more
than ready to insure that the government was not shut down by a bunch of
“crazies.”
That bastinado bit turned out to be a
football stadium, ironically the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium the home of the
professional Washington Redskins. Many of the thousands were thrown in there
once the jails had been filled. Ralph had run into Sam on the floor of the field
when he had noticed that Sam had a VVAW button on his shirt and asked if he was
a veteran and from where. Sam told Ralph his story about Jeff and from there it
turned out although they had come to that place under different reasonings over
the few days being held there they found out they shared some things including
class background in common.
The “things in common” they had
initially discussed on that football field and which they would do in that
subsequent meeting in 2014 at Jack’s Grille in Cambridge where they would go
for a few drinks and while away a few hours was an intense interest in the
American Civil War which was at the time of the Jack’s Grille meeting in its
150th anniversary years of commemoration. That conversation had
begun because Sam had just recently re-read Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword about the decisive middle years of that war
turning it from a half-hearted fight to preserve the union into a revolutionary
struggle to overthrown the institution of slavery forever. After a few drinks
and some heated talk about General McClellan’s merits as commander of the key
Army of the Potomac and Lincoln’s determined efforts to abolish slavery when he
felt that was the only way to preserve the union as it was they turned to a
very different subject of noir detectives, of their love for the old time
detective stories (and film adaptations) by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler.
The initial conversation down in
Washington about the film detectives had been spurred by Sam telling Ralph
about Dashiell Hammett’s harassment by the government for being a strong vocal
sympathizer of the American Communist Party and its various groups. Had spent
time in jail for contempt. Ralph, still in the throes of a the vacuous
anti-communist red scare Cold war night dreams of his youth, refused to believe
that at first since Hammett’s detectives seemed so apolitical and macho
(although he probably did not use that word which was just beginning to creep
into the language with the rise of the women’s liberation movement). That discussion
had gotten them into a whole range of topics around the qualities they liked in
the old time detectives and over the subsequent years they would renew their
conversations whenever one or the other read, or rather re-read, one of the
classics (or saw one of the film adaptations Sam had seen The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor about ten
times and could quote some of the dialogue by heart).
The conversation that night in 2014
had been brought on after Ralph told Sam that he had been at the Troy Public
Library in order to try and find a copy of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely after having just seen through the beauty of
Netflix the film adaptation with Dick Powell as the famous Chandler detective
Philip Marlowe (presented under the movie title Murder, My Sweet) which differed in some respects from what he
remembered from reading the book as a kid. He couldn’t find that book (it was out
in circulation) but came across another Chandler book that he had never heard
of, Poodle Springs. The reason that
he had never heard of it was that it had never been finished by Chandler before
he died in La Jolla in 1959. What had happened was the then currently famous
(1989) detective story writer (the Spenser series among others), Robert Parker
had taken it upon himself as an act of respect to finish the story. To give his
take on what old Philip Marlowe would morph into in the 1960s (or later) if
Chandler had finished the novel.
Sam was a bit intrigued by what Ralph
had stumbled upon and since he (they) knew that Parker’s detectives tended to
be ultra-cool and less hard-boiled than Marlowe he asked Ralph to give him the
skinny on the story-line and how Parker treated the iconic Marlowe. First off
Ralph surprised Sam with the fact that old hard-bitten loner Marlowe had gotten
married to some hot sexy rich as Midas dish although the circumstances of their
meeting and marriage had not been revealed. Sam, having been married three
times and divorced as many, smirked and remarked that one of the things that
had attracted him to Marlowe in his periodic re-readings was that while he
liked the ladies (and the ladies liked him as they did in Poodle Springs as well) he could take them or leave, could go to
bed with them one night and turn them in to the coppers the next morning. No
good could come of marriage to tie him down in the rough-hewned search for a
little rough justice in the world. Ralph, having been married three times and
divorced twice, laughed and said he had that exact same feeling. A Marlowe for
the modern age they both thought like Eliot Gould was in the film adaptation of
The Long Good-bye all ultra-cool and
kind of detached from the windmill-seeking world.
Ralph continued. Naturally being
married to a rich as Midas (or her father was anyway) hot sexy young woman who
plunked them out into exclusive, very exclusive, Poodle Springs there was
nothing but tension between Philip and the Mrs. (Linda) since he had to make
his own nut in the world and that meant for an old-time detective with plenty
of scars, knocks on the head, and a few night in the pokey to set up shop out
among the heathen rich and see what played out. That tension between them would
never get resolved, or only got resolved by them separating but continuing to
have rolls in the hay together (you know friend’s with privileges in today
speak) but it took up far too much of the couple of hundred pages with her
carping and him saying he had be his own man and not some poodle, or some kind
of dog to be walked around with among the high and mighty. Ralph said he longed
for the old days when Marlowe would have tossed a Velma or a Sternwood daughter
to the wolves for trying to rein him in like that.
Of course in order to have a
detective story Marlowe needed a client and presto up came Lippy, Lippy the
front-man casino owner, even before he had set up an office. Lippy needed
Marlowe to find a guy who owned him a ton of dough on a gambling debt, or else.
Marlowe hopped right to it, found the guy no problem. Well, not no problem
because the guy Les/Larry was a risk addict married to two woman, a bigamist, one
for love the other for her dough or rather her father’s dough. Not only that
his profession, or had been profession, backdoor sleaze pornographic
photographer was creeping up on him. See he was being blackmailed by some frail
who had the goods on his kinky rich second wife. 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
he will take some heat from the coppers who still don’t’ like gumshoes messing
in their nice set-up murder cases. Of course Marlowe was silent about who might
have killed the pair since he figured 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. 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.
Of course along the way old Marlowe
got knocked up on the head, got some jail time, smoked a million cigarettes,
drank good and booze and stuck to his guns. So not a bad job by Parker to fill
Chandler’s big shoes. But at the end of the evening, having maybe about three
drinks too many, both Ralph and Sam were shaking their heads about why in the
end Marlowe let that nagging wife no matter how sexy and bed-mate worthy back
into his bedroom. Damn.
