Way out west, there was this fella,
this fella that I want to tell you about,
fella by the name of Philip Marlowe.
At least that's the handle his beloved,
yet often sozzled creator gave him.
But he never had much use for it
himself.
This Marlowe, he often called himself
a "Shamus", with emphasis on
"SHA" when pronounced, like
"Sha-na-na" and not "Shay". Now,
Shamus, that's a name no one
would self-apply where I come
from. But then there was a lot
about this gumshoe that didn't
make a whole lot of sense to me.
And a lot about where he lived,
likewise. But, then again, maybe
that's why I found Marlowe and the
place he lived in so durn
interesting.
Now this here story I'm blogging
about took place in the late-80's,
just about the time of Madonna
and Max Headroom and cartoons
talking mermaids and dogs talking
like Burt Reynolds and just before
Michael Keaton put on a pair of
Nike boots and dressed up as
Batman. 1988. I only mention it
'cause sometimes there's a man,
I won't say a hero, 'cause what's
a hero? But sometimes there's a
man, and I'm talking about this
shamus here, sometimes there's
a man - well, he's NOT the man for
his time and place. He DOESN'T fit
right in there, he's an anachronism,
and that's Philip Marlowe, in Los
Angeles. And even if he's not a very
perceptive detective, and Marlowe
was most certainly NOT that, quite
possibly the least-perceptive player
in his chronicles, which would place
him high in the running for the most
clueless, yet highly-respected sleuth
in detective fiction worldwide...But
sometimes there's a detective...
sometimes there's a detective...
Ah, I lost my train of thought, here.
But...ah, hell. He's the only one who
cares. I done introduced him enough.
Writers will do a thing sometimes to amuse themselves with the manuscript. They'll name-drop an actor who could be their choice for playing the character in their book for a possible film/television adaptation. With Only To Sleep, Lawrence Osborne drops Beau Bridges in there, in passing. Beau Bridges as Philip Marlowe? Or in this case, a 72 year-old Philip Marlowe. Possible. But frankly, nowadays the actor playing Philip Marlowe in a new movie with the surname of "Bridges" is likely to be Beau's younger brother, Jeff. The Dude. Playing Jeffrey Lebowski has become Jeff Bridges performance by default...I don't know if his own personality became subsumed by the character, or if it crystallized him, made him identifiable in a way that he wasn't in roles played prior to The Big Lebowski, which I always thought was the Coen brothers' answer to Pulp Fiction and is arguably more-popular than the latter nowadays...or it just seems so, since you can find Lebowski re-released in theaters every summer and is on basic cable as often as Goodfellas...
Ah, I'm going off on a tangent..
No, back to Marlowe. He's 72 in this book, retired and walking around with a swordcane...'cause that's a cool "toy" on every old man's want-list. He feels like he's marking time, but young, 38 years-old Marlowe always talked like that in the old books..I can't remember the blogger who wrote it, but he observed that Marlowe always acts like he's wondering why he's alive, and that attitude is in this new book, too, so it feels authentic.
This is the fourth Marlowe novel authorized by the estate of Raymond Chandler. The first three tried coasting on scraps - Poodle Springs was built off 3 brief sample chapters Chandler probably typed up to amuse himself (Marlowe married to Linda Loring? Heh heh heh), Perchance To Dream was Robert B. Parker's sequel to The Big Sleep, which only felt an attempt at identifying Marlowe with his own private eye character, Spenser, followed years later with Benjamin Black's effort The Black-Eyed Blonde, which proved you could do pastiches of Marlowe in perpetuity, but would you really want to read them if it doesn't feel like Marlowe was brought back to life? That's the appeal of the Chandler books. Marlowe may never realize that he's the only character in his stories that's not hip to what's happening, but he's the only character who cares, and the real highlight of the books of finding out what he cares about in each tale that makes him push on in these quests. In The Big Sleep, he felt bad about invalid General Sternwood saddled with two dirty daughters. What's he looking for to care about in Only To Sleep? Osborne decides it's the father of the man whose identity was stolen by Donald Zinn - a con artist who faked his death and is living a new life in Mexico with his younger wife. Marlowe takes a fancy to this femme fatale, but like the Marlowe of old, he resists her comely charms while revealing that he's still tempted as he was in the old days, even though he no longer looks like a matinee idol, if that's how he ever ever thought he looked like.
Zinn is clearly a dark mirror-image of Marlowe, though I can imagine John Slattery playing him in the movie, with Ana de Armas as Delores Araya, Zinn's "widow"/partner-in-crime/able Grable/Marlowe's femme fatale. He's living the life Marlowe toyed with having accepted Linda Loring's impulsive marriage proposal in Playback and tried out in Poodle Springs before Osborne's revelation in Only To Sleep:
"You know, I was married once, but the condition doesn't agree with me. It makes me unstable."
Rather eloquently put, that. There are a lot of passages in the book that give it a convincing texture, even though itdoesn't make much of the fact that it's set in the 80's. It feels it could be set in any decade pre-internet and the results are the same. The window-dressing was never the appeal of the Marlowe books. You read Marlowe for Marlowe. And this feels like Marlowe. Ironic that he's now the same age as Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot, given how Chandler thought little of Agatha Christie's work, but the private eye genre can be just as unreal and far-fetched. Read whatever you like.
Osborne's timeline suggests Marlowe would've turned 100 in 2015, yet because he can exist in that charmed state of suspended animation that keeps fictional characters from aging further, he could still appear again, this time with a swordcane in hand for his 2nd life, pondering the ephemerality of life and the persistence of yearning...he's a Miyazaki character, now.
Well, you know...sometimes
you eat the bear, and
sometimes, you know...
The shamus abides.
I don't know about you, but
I take comfort in that. It's good
knowing he's out there,
the shamus, taking her easy
for all us readers. Shoosh,
I hope he keeps on going
into the next millenia. Well,
that about does her. Wraps
her all up. Things seem to
have worked out pretty good
for the shamus and Delores.
And it was a pretty good story,
don't you think? Made me
laugh to beat the band...
parts anyway. I didn't like
seeing Delores go. But then
I happen to know..there's a
little Marlowe on the way. That
might just absolute horseshit
on my part, but I believe that's
the way the whole darned human
comedy keeps perpetuating
itself down through the
generations. Westward the
Studebakers, across the sands
of time until we - oh, look at
me. I'm rambling again. Well,
I hope you folks enjoyed
yourselves. Catch you later on
down the social media trail.
Say, friend, you got any more
of that good non-alcoholic
margaritas? Margarita Hayworth?..
