Philip Marlowe-Redux- With Raymond Chandler and Robert Parker’s Poodle Springs in Mind.

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 150^th 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.