Poodle Springs [Paperback]

Yet Parker is not Chandler and there are places in the book where I kept feeling that he wasn't getting Marlowe just right. Probably I was looking for these non-Chandleresque moments and they are actually intriguing. Marlowe fans can read the book with this additional level of interest: did Parker capture the essence of Philip Marlowe in this scene or not?

All that aside this is a well-paced and entertaining mystery. There is a side plot as the book opens right after Marlowe's marriage to an heiress. The tension is between the independent and honest detective and his pampered wife who can't understand each other. He gets along better with her house boy, and she can't understand why he won't sit back and let her daddy take care of them.

The main plot is pure Marlowe with a sleazy pornographer/blackmailer leading a double life and mixed up in a murder. Marlowe keeps discovering bodies which puts him in trouble with the cops. Yet he can't quite figure out who is the murderer until it is almost too late.

If you haven't read Raymond Chandler this is not the place to start. Although this is a minor addition to the Marlowe corpus, it will be a welcome addition to those who have read the other works and desire more Marlowe. It reads quickly and never lets you down.

Some anachronisms jarred my reading. I can believe Linda driving a Fleetwood convertible in 1959 or 1969, but they were long obsolete by 1989. While scandals from nude photos were believable then, the weekly magazines and newspapers have inured us since the 1970s. Unless it involved an elected official, and maybe not even then. Marlowe seems to drive around without ever getting caught in traffic, too. Is LA like that? At 42, does his attitudes reflect other baby boomers? The story involves a gambling establishment outside the city limits. Would either the FBI or Calif pass up a chance to raid it since the 1960s? Wouldn't a casino in Nevada be more likely? The sun-drenched streets of pre-war Los Angeles ("the best trolley system in the country") have been long replaced by the smog and gloom of Big Oil's Freeways. "Roger Rabbit" treated this as background for a cartoon.

The square miles of land around LA were worthless because there was no trolley system there. Destroying the trolley system put people into cars. Now these distant lands became commercially valuable. Newspaper owners benefitted when they were developed. Even bigger forces were at work to bring in Government contracts, and factories from out or state. The northeast was drained to irrigate southern California. And all perfectly legal!

The ending is different from "The Big Sleep", and it seems more cynical to wrap it up with a 'deus ex machina' ending. TBS let the guilty walk because they were rich and powerful, and doesn't it still happen that way? Not just in LA? A better ending would find the suicided Larry Victor with a typed but unsigned confession, and the widow Valentine hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.