Philip Marlowe Returns to the Mean ‘Springs’

Here’s the set-up: Philip Marlowe, L.A.’s most famous fictional gumshoe, has finally tied the knot--with the beautiful heiress Linda Loring, last seen at the end of Raymond Chandler’s “Playback” in 1958 phoning Marlowe from Paris and saying she wants to marry him.

The new Mrs. Marlowe is head-over-high-heels in love with the hard-boiled detective. The feeling is mutual.

Marlowe closes up his seedy office above Hollywood Boulevard, leaving L.A.’s gritty mean streets for the money-lined drives of the Springs where Linda has rented a house “for the season,” complete with a man servant to keep the gimlet glasses full.

But Marlowe’s not the kind of guy who can loll around the pool during the day, attend cocktail parties with the swells at night and live off his wife’s dough. So he opens a new office above a filling station and waits for business. It doesn’t take long: The owner of a desert night club known to permit gambling hires Marlowe to locate a high roller named Les Valentine who’s skipped town without paying his $100,000 marker.

And that’s where Raymond Chandler left off in an unfinished manuscript written two years before the celebrated mystery writer died in La Jolla in 1959 at age 70.

Four chapters--29 pages and only the germ of an idea for a Philip Marlowe mystery that Chandler referred to simply as “The Poodle Springs Story.”

That was enough for Robert B. Parker, the best-selling author of 17 Spenser private-eye mysteries.

The Boston-based writer was contacted a year ago by the literary agent for the Chandler estate and was asked if he’d complete Chandler’s unfinished mystery novel.

Parker wasted no time in accepting.

“I didn’t have any second thoughts about it,” says Parker. “Some of it’s ego. I knew someone would do it and I wanted it to be me because I didn’t want them to screw it up. And I was a great Chandler admirer and I had read all of his books and had done a doctoral dissertation on him. So I had no hesitation about it.”

The result is “Poodle Springs” (Putnam; $18.95) by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. (Chandler created the tongue-in-cheek pseudonym for Palm Springs because, he wrote, “every third elegant creature you see has at least one poodle.”)

By all early accounts Parker, 57, has not only pulled off what would seem to be an intimidating literary assignment but has done so brilliantly.

Glowed mystery writer Ed McBain in his rave New York Times review Sunday: “That Mr. Parker pulls off the stunt is a tribute to his enormous skill. . . . At his very best Mr. Parker sounds more like Chandler than Chandler himself--but with an edge the master had begun to lose in the waning days of his life.”

The former Northeastern University English professor arrived in Orange early for an interview, pulling into a restaurant parking lot in true Southern California style: a black convertible Porsche driven by his publicist. Laughed Parker: “I mean this guy drives up in a suit and a Porsche and I get out with him: Which do you think is the writer? Who’s the slob with him?”

Casually dressed in a red and navy windbreaker with a thin gold chain around his neck, the affable Parker settled into a booth. A beefy man with short-cropped hair and a mustache--he tones his bulk with jogging and weightlifting--Parker ordered a bowl of bean soup. Unlike the heavy-drinking Chandler in his prime, Parker sipped a glass of ice water. (“I have drunk more in my life than I do now, but I don’t have any difficulty with it. I essentially don’t really drink.”)

Parker explained that once the deal was made for him to write the first new Philip Marlowe detective novel in 31 years, he went right to work. Three months later he was finished, having pulled off a literary feat of international importance in the same amount of time it takes him to write one of his Spenser novels.

“Well,” Parker said, waiting for his soup to cool, “that’s about what it takes me to write a book. I write five pages a day and I write five days a week and the book’s about 300 pages, so you get about 60 writing days, which usually works out to about three months.”

But, one would assume, given the heavy responsibility of carrying on the Chandler tradition--of having to make a seamless transition between Chandler’s material and his own and having to capture the fabled prose of a man who defined L.A. better than anyone--such an assignment would give one pause--if not a crippling case of writer’s block.

“Well,” Parker said, “I don’t work any better by working slower and I don’t work any better by revising. I have a great deal of discipline and I write five pages each day. This was harder to write than the Spenser books because of the things you just pointed out, so I expended more energy: I was tired at the end of the day, but I still did my five pages.”

Parker allows that he had an advantage at the outset: As a Chandler scholar, he had read the six previous Philip Marlowe novels countless times.

“I didn’t reread because I’ve reread so much,” he said. “I know the books. Almost any time I come to Los Angeles, I read the Chandler books. And he got it right, you know. It is like he said it was.”

Parker said the first four chapters of “Poodle Springs” remain just as Chandler wrote them.

“I didn’t touch them,” he said. “The first four chapters are not the best work he did either. They’re not terribly good. I think it’s unfair to him because I’m sure he would have revised them. He was a reviser. But I did not change it because I thought that’s the way he wrote it and it’s not up to me to change it. I thought it would have been cheating.”

As a writer, Parker said, Chandler was not a man who planned ahead. “So he usually didn’t know when he started writing where the story was going to go. A lot of guys do that. I don’t. I’m a big outliner and planner. That’s one of the reasons I can write so regularly because I’ve thought about it ahead of time. So when I came to writing Chapter Five I was probably in the same position he was: He didn’t know where he was going to go and neither did I.”

One major story element that Parker could not alter is that Marlowe--the cynical, loner private eye--is married. Parker said that was both “good and bad.”

“I had no experience with a married Marlowe, but no one else had either,” he said. “So it was a whole new world for Marlowe and for me to work with. And it’s an area in which I probably do better than Chandler did, actually--the romance, the man-and-woman stuff. It wasn’t his strong suit.”

Parker agrees that Marlowe is not really the marrying kind.

“I think, personally--and I have no documentation to back it up--but I think it was (because) Chandler’s wife had died a while back and he was devastated by her death and I think he somehow wanted to replace her by having Marlowe have a love affair now that his wife is gone. That’s my own guess. Writers can do that, and my suspicion is that that is what he did.”

In one of Chandler’s letters, Chandler says he thinks the marriage might not work out. “I could make it work or not work as I chose,” said Parker. “But it was interesting. I was aware of the fact that he thought it wouldn’t work.”

In writing “Poodle Springs,” Parker said he was “very conscious” of toeing a fine line between faithfully emulating Chandler’s much-imitated prose style and falling into the trap of parody.

“I think imitation gets to be parody real quick,” he said. “I think you can do a good imitation of any writer for a page, but not for 300. It becomes a joke. So I set out deliberately not to imitate him. What I did was say I’m going to get inside Marlowe’s point of view and I’m going to remember that it’s Marlowe telling the story. And that’s hard because I kept wanting it to be Spenser, you know. But I stuck to that and that’s how I kept it the way it is. I made no attempt to use similes the way that Chandler did.”

Chandler fans, however, can relish a handful of newly minted Marlowisms. In his review, Ed McBain praised Parker for “throwing away a simile many other writers would kill for: ‘The office was as blank as a waiter’s stare.’ ”

Parker said his own writing is “a little more spare, a little more minimalist, than Chandler’s and I tried to be a little more gorgeous, a little more rococo in my similes, and I kind of like it. I may do it in my own writing.”

One of the criticisms of “Poodle Springs” is figuring out exactly when the story is set. Chandler, of course, wrote his opening chapters in 1957, a time when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and the Chinese Theater still bore the name Grauman’s. There are, however, some distinctly contemporary touches such as references to pornographic magazines on sale at neighborhood newsstands.

And while Parker is mindful that Marlowe is 42 years old in “Poodle Springs,” which would place him in the late 1950s, the author seems uncertain himself as to when the story is set.

“It’s sort of timeless and I deliberately did that,” he said. “There’s no mention of movies or popular songs or baseball games. You don’t say anything about what the cars look like. It makes it kind of a neutral time.”

As the creator of the witty and literate Spenser, how does Parker compare his fictional detective with the wisecracking, cynical Marlowe?

“I think one is a descendant of the other,” said Parker, who did not publish his first Spenser novel until he was 42. “I was very much influenced by Chandler in the beginning when I was writing. As I sort of got confidence and success, I went my own way--found, as they say, my own voice. Marlowe is sadder than Spenser, he’s more isolated than Spenser, he has more self-pity than Spenser. Spenser has friends, Spenser has a continuing relationship with a woman. He (Marlowe) is more racist than Spenser, he’s more sexist than Spenser, he’s much more aware and skeptical of the difference between rich and poor.”

Asked to give his description of Philip Marlowe, Parker deferred to the character’s creator.

“I think he’s best described in Chandler’s own words in that essay ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ And he is a man who insists on living life on his own terms. He insists on being honorable in a world that is largely dishonorable. He’s able to overcome his fear of death. He won’t be tempted by money or by sex, so he’s, in that sense, a romantic hero.”

“Marlowe’s also somewhat more aware of class and race and sex and the differences that those things imply than I am, or that Spenser is. And I tried to be honest with that. I didn’t clean him up for the ‘80s. I left him with his prejudices and that was hard because I don’t agree with any of that.”

In the realm of detective writers, Parker deems Chandler “the best.”

“I think he’s a fine writer of any genre and a significant writer for the first half of the 20th Century. When you read ‘The Big Sleep’ you are reading something that no one ever did before. I mean (Dashiell) Hammett had taken the hard-boiled Hemingway hero and turned him into the mean streets, but Chandler gave him a romantic vision. And no one ever had done that before.”

Does he view “Poodle Springs” as his tribute to Chandler?

“It’s an homage to the master, I suppose,” he said, “and I think that’s one reason I wrote it. It’s a good economic deal, but it’s not a better economic deal than I have to write a Spenser book. I’d have done just as well to write another Spenser as far as the deal goes. It was something I was pleased to do.”

Parker said he’s not sure whether he’ll write another Philip Marlowe mystery.

“Maybe I’d do another one if this one does well, if there’s pressure to do another one, if the public says, Let’s have more,” he said. “But I won’t keep doing it.”

BACKGROUND

Author Robert B. Parker is a former Northeastern University English professor who did his doctoral dissertation on mystery writer Raymond Chandler.