Series Saturday: the Philip Marlowe novels

This is a blog series about … well, series. I love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies, comics.

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In 2019, I realized after several conversations with my friend Dave (our conversations often lead to me identifying something I haven’t read or seen) that I had never read a Philip Marlowe novel (or likely anything else by Raymond Chandler). I mean, I knew who Marlowe was, and I knew Chandler’s influence on the mystery genre overall and noir in particular. So how was it that I could not recall every having read a single Marlowe book? It was time to fix that!

As with so many of the reading and/or viewing challenges I set myself, it took a while for this one to play out. I listened to the first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep, in late 2019, and then decided to motivate myself by making the Marlowe books a part of my “Complete the Series” Challenge for 2020. I made a game start at the beginning of the year thanks to several long work trips with lots of driving, then dropped the ball until Noirvember when I read the final two books written or co-written by Chandler.

The long gap between the first six books and the final two influenced my experience of the series as a whole. Another influence was experiencing the series in three different forms. I listened to the first two novels narrated by Ray Porter. When I went to purchase book three, I discovered that it was not available with narration by Porter – nor were the rest of the books. That left me with either listening to abridged editions narrated by Elliot Gould or full-cast recording from the BBC starring Toby Stephens. As I really wanted to continue the experience of hearing Chandler’s actual words, I chose the Gould abridged editions. When it came time for book seven? Only the full-cast BBC version was available. I switched to print for the final two books, which partially explains the seven months gap as the last book (started by Chandler but completed after his death by Robert B. Parker) was harder to track down than I expected it to be.

Overall, I loved this series. So much of what Chandler did is consider trope now – but I believe he was the first to do it, or at least the first to do it well enough to influence others.

His characterization of Marlowe – world-weary, introspective, a bit of a horn-dog, chivalrous and chauvinistic in equal measure, aware of his own prejudices and not always able to stop himself from acting on them – set a standard for disgruntled, distrusting protagonists. And the characterization isn’t quite static. In some books, he’s far more introspective and fatalistic while in others he’s just cynical and snarky. (Okay, he’s snarky in every single book. It’s part of his charm.) The heaviest introspective moments, the moments that gave noir its enduring rep, seem to come in the second through fifth books. In the first book, Marlowe is thoughtful but not full-out depressing. In the later books, Marlowe seems to have mellowed a little. He’s still world-weary but he seems to have accepted it and ruminates less on it. Or at least, he spends fewer words ruminating on it.

Chandler’s formula was to have Marlowe take on a case that then connects to one or more other cases. I may be mistaken, but I don’t think he varied from that basic formula throughout the books (and it’s especially evident in the final book, Playback). Most of the time, he’s hired by someone rich who is condescending at best and occasionally downright hostile. And these rich folks usually get some kind of come-uppance even when they’re not the actual bad guy of the story. In terms of the mysteries, Chandler is usually good about providing the reader with enough hints of what’s going on that the reveal doesn’t come out of nowhere. Marlowe’s interactions with the police are always interesting and not always antagonistic (I’d say it’s about 50/50 over the series). It’s also sort of fun trying to figure who Marlowe is going to go to bed with and when (and occasionally even if – he doesn’t always let his hormones win over common sense).

One of the things that did surprise me was how few continuing supporting characters there are. I expected Marlowe’s former boss, introduced in the first book, to appear or at least be mentioned more than once. Likewise, some of the cops; I realize Los Angeles was a big city even in the 1940s and that some of the action rolls outside of LA proper (even down to San Diego and into Mexico), but we rarely see an officer of the law a second time. (Parker does bring one of them back in Poodle Springs, but I have to wonder if Chandler would have done so had he written more than four chapters before passing away). Nowadays, the idea of a detective character without a regular supporting cast, including a regular antagonist of some kind, is unthinkable. Then again, the idea of a series lead without a serious romantic interest is also unthinkable these days, and it’s only in the final three books that we see Marlowe make a serious commitment (even if we don’t realize he’s making the commitment until the end of Playback and the opening of Poodle Springs). I personally thought Anne Riordan from Farewell, My Lovely, had the makings of a perfect non-romantic Girl Friday and would have added a lot to later books.

So how did the various listening/reading formats affect my experience?

I really loved Ray Porter’s interpretation of the character, gruff-voiced but still relatable, and that set the tone for me. He plays with Chandler’s language the way someone who really enjoys lush descriptions does. He’s clearly invested in the role and having fun with it, and every word has appropriate weight. I really wish the entire run was available narrated by Porter (who has narrated a LOT of other stuff, and I’m never disappointed with his work when I get to listen to it).

Elliot Gould is well known for playing Marlowe in 1973’s film version of The Long Goodbye, and he’s a great reader who also really gets the character – but the abridged audiobooks feel rushed. There are no chapter breaks, the action running from one scene to another without the pause such breaks afford the reader. More than once I found myself confused because of contradictory back-to-back statements (it’s midnight, and then suddenly it’s noon, for instance) that a simple intonation of “Chapter Six,” or even a ten second pause, would have broken up. My theory, which I haven’t checked, is that the Gould-narrated books (including the first two, which I didn’t listen to) were recorded at a time when audiobooks were on cassette (and the more cassettes a publisher had to produce, the higher the price) or early CDs (when the discs couldn’t hold as much data as they do now). Then there’s the fact that they’re advertised as “abridged,” which means something deemed inconsequential by someone was removed to make the narration fit into the allotted cassette or CD space. I’m still wondering what I missed by not just reading the actual novels of these five books.

Reading, instead of listening to, Playback and Poodle Springs allowed me to merge the best parts of Porter and Gould’s performances in my head. Although thanks to the cover art on Playback my mental image of Marlowe was Robert Mitchum. (It’s not Mitchum on the cover – it just looks a lot like him.) It felt appropriate to be in the home stretch with Marlowe on my own, turning yellowed pages (one paperback, one hardcover, both from used bookstores) and savoring Chandler’s descriptions of places and people.

I can imagine rereading the entire series one day, especially because I’ll always have that nagging question of what the abridged audiobooks cut out. But for now, I’m glad I finished this challenge this year!

The Marlowe Books, in order, are:

·       The Big Sleep (1939)

·       Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

·       The High Window (1942)

·       The Lady in the Lake (1943)

·       The Little Sister (1949)

·       The Long Goodbye (1953)

·       Playback (1958)

·       Poodle Springs (unfinished by Chandler at his death in 1959; completed by Robert B. Parker in 1989)

Parker did write another sequel completely on his own, which I decided not to include in this particular challenge. And there have been several other Marlowe prequels and sequels in the past few years that sound like they might be worth seeking out.

Page To Screen: Evening Primrose

Page to Screen is a series of blog posts where I read a book or story and then watch a movie based on said book or story. It will be intermittent, I’m sure, like most of my “regular” features. The first, unofficial Page to Screen entry was my review of The Bitter Tea of General Yen and the classic movie adapted from it.

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Okay, so this one is technically a little backwards from the intent, because I first saw the television musical version of Evening Primrose at the Museum of Television Arts in New York City back in the late 90s. I had not seen it since then. When I discovered that the episode was on DVD and that the short story it was based on was available in print, I decided it was time to read the original story and rewatch the movie. WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS, FOR BOTH THE STORY AND THE TELEVISION EPISODE. I can’t talk about the differences between the two without spoiling stuff.

STORY REVIEW

“Evening Primrose” by John Collier is a brief twelve pages, an “accidentally found manuscript” type of story. The story purports to have been found scribbled in a pad of Highlife Bond paper bought by a customer at Bracey’s Giant Emporium. What the purchaser of the notepad (a Miss Sadie Brodribb) thinks of the tale she’s accidentally purchased, we never learn. As is the nature of people, she probably thought it was some kind of practical joke by the store employees (akin to finding a “help, I’m being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory” note in your fortune cookie). The story itself is the first person account of Mr. Charles Snell, a poet who decides the real world is no longer for him and that he’ll live in Bracey’s. He’ll hide during the day, and eat/drink/write poetry at night, deftly avoiding the store’s night watchman. He quickly discovers he’s not alone in living in the store, that this is a thing people do in stores large and small all across the city – people who for one reason or another have eschewed normal society. The community in Bracey’s has a hierarchy, at the top of which sits the regal Mrs. Vanderpant, and at the bottom of which sits a teen serving girl named Ella. Charles is warned that people who betray the community are sentenced to removal by the Dark Men, who turn the offendees into mannequins. Charles falls in love with the servant girl, who is in love with the night watchman (who remains oblivious to the community living around him). Charles decides to respect Ella’s love for another man and to help them meet and escape. Only in his emotional despair over Ella not loving him, he spills the beans to a community member he trusts. The story ends with Ella trussed up for the Dark Men and Charles determined to find the night watchman and rescue her. Charles’ final lines indicate his plan to leave his notes where a customer might find them, in case his plan to rescue Ella results in himself and the watchman also being killed. 

It’s a tightly-told story, and Collier builds the mystery of the community and threat of the Dark Men smoothly throughout the story – but the ending feels just a bit too abrupt. Charles declares his love, gets rebuffed, accidentally betrays Ella, and sets his plan to rescue her all within the final two pages of the story. I wish Collier had built the suspense of what would happen to Ella and Charles just a little bit more before the end. Regardless, I enjoyed the concept, the mood, the reveal of Charles’ character, the development of the Bracey’s community (and their relationship to communities in other stores) and eerie threat of the Dark Men.

“MOVIE” REVIEW

The television episode “Evening Primrose” first aired on November 16, 1966 as a part of the ABC Stage 67 anthology series. I would have been a whole three months old. I have no clue whether my parents watched it. Given their love of television and my father’s love of musicals, I’m going to guess they did. It starred the perfectly cast Anthony Perkins as misanthropic poet Charles Snell and Charmaine Carr as innocent, uneducated Ella Harkness, with Dorothy Stickney as more dotty-than-regal Mrs. Monday (a renamed Mrs. Vanderpant).

It’s a musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Goldman and directed by Paul Bogart. The creators and cast do a wonderful job translating the mood of the story to the screen – all the “free but still sort of trapped” sensibility, the rigidness of the Paul Stern (renamed from Bracey’s) store community, the threat of the Dark Men is there in the staging, dialogue, lyrics and instrumental music – and hey fix the pacing issue I had with the story, giving the romantic relationship more time to develop and giving space to the real threat of the Dark Men at the end. The songs start out character-centric and then become plot-propelling. Charles’ song “If You Can Find Me I’m Here” is one of the best misanthropic “you don’t like my art, screw you” songs ever written, while Ella’s “I Remember Sky” is a wistfully beautiful piece. The duet “When” moves their relationship along and incorporates their fears of being found out, while the duet “Take Me to the World” is the point at which the plot turns towards the big denouement.  

There are a couple of significant changes to the story, as often happens in page-to-screen adaptations. Ella is now an adult (to remove the ickiness of a poet in his late twenties falling in love with a sixteen-year-old, I assume) and her mistreatment at the hands of the older community members is made more explicit (including that they have never taught her to read, write, or do math, and force her to live in the store basement). Instead of unrequited love, Ella falls as much in love with Charles as he does with her. And in what I think is a very sensible change that heightens the drama of the last act, the couple is found out not through Charles intentionally revealing his feelings to his ‘trusted friend’ Roscoe, but because Charles accidentally turns on the store’s speaker system while they are singing “Take Me To The World” and unknowingly lets the entire store community know what they are planning (the night watchman hears too, thus revealing that there are people living in the store even if he can’t manage to find them, which puts him in danger without having to work in the awkward love triangle).

The final act is a wonderful game of cat-and-mouse through the store as Mrs. Monday and Roscoe try to delay Charles and Ella long enough for the Dark Men to catch them. The fate of the characters implied by the structure of Collier’s story is made explicit in the final scenes of the episode. I always thought it was a delightfully dark ending, and I’m glad Goldman and Sondheim didn’t decide to change it for television.

Interesting trivia: while the television episode originally aired in color, the only print remaining is in black and white. And I actually think that adds to the mood and thus effectiveness of the production. I’m kind of glad the color print isn’t available (the DVD has some test footage of Anthony Perkins in Stern Brothers and it just feels too bright for the story being told).

FINAL COMPARISON

While I liked Collier’s story well enough and I want to read more of his short stories, I think I prefer the musical in this instance.

The Collier story can be found in his collection Fancies and Goodnights. The Sondheim-Goldman musical is available on DVD and Prime Video.

SERIES SATURDAY: Sgt. Janus


This is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.

Cover art by Jeffrey Ray Hayes

Cover art by Jeffrey Ray Hayes

 

While I’m not as well-read in the field as I’d like to be, I really do love the “occult detective” genre. There’s a long history to it, from the Victorian (Thomas Carnacki and Aylmer Vance) to the pulp (Jules deGrandin and John Thunstone) to the modern (Simon Feximal and John Constantine), and it has seeped from the written to the filmed (Carl Kolchak among others). Jim Beard’s Sgt. Roman Janus is an intriguing addition to the genre.

Janus has now appeared in three books: Sgt. Janus, Spirit-Breaker; Sgt. Janus Returns, and Sgt. Janus on the Dark Track. Flinch! Books has recently reissued the first two books as a precursor to their release of the third (and hopefully not final) book in the series. All three have beautifully painted new covers by Jeffrey Ray Hayes that capture the otherworldly nature of the characters.

As a character, Sgt. Janus fits the mold of the occult detectives who have preceded him into print: his personal background is shrouded in mystery (at least at the start), he’s a bit aloof, he doesn’t often explain fully what’s going on (and assumes, I think, that most people believe he’s up to shenanigans and the supernatural can’t possibly be real), and he does what he has to do regardless of personal cost.

What really makes the series stand out from the rest of the field is the way Beard tells Janus’ stories. He plays with genre conventions and delivers stories that feel daring and original within a pretty well-traveled realm.

One of the tropes of “consulting detective” fiction (both occult and not), dating back to the inestimable Sherlock Holmes, is the presence of a narrator who is also usually the detective’s aide-de-camp. Most detectives have their Watson, Parker, Caldwell, etc.. In Sgt. Janus, Spirit-Breaker, Beard replaces one reliable narrator with eight sometimes unreliable narrators. Each tale in the book is told by the client for whom Janus was working, part of his fee being that the client must send him a written description of how the case came to Janus’ attention and how it unfolded. This gives far more diversity to the way the stories are related – some of the clients are happy to be doing it and believe in Janus’ abilities, while some are disgruntled and imbue their stories with a healthy skepticism. This also allows Sgt. Janus himself to remain a mystery, his personal background and that of his female assistant and the house they occupy all only hinted at in the little tidbits he drops to his clients when they ask. And while each case stands alone, they also very clearly build on each other. The reader makes larger connections the characters themselves don’t, and the final story makes those connections as explicit as possible in revealing what it’s all been building towards.

The second book, Sgt. Janus Returns, follows the more traditional trope for narrators, introducing us to Joshua Hargreaves, a disaffected young man who meets an amnesiac woman who exhibits many of Sgt. Janus’ personality traits and abilities. Hargreaves becomes her aide-de-camp and chronicler while she tries to figure out who she is and why she feels connected to the house the missing Sgt. Janus used to occupy. Similar to the first volume, the stories herein are still episodic and still build towards a climax that reveals all – and in fact reveal a great deal more than the climactic story of the first book. Beard takes a huge chance by replacing his main character in the second book of the series – and it works. Perhaps it was because I read the books back-to-back-to-back, but I was invested in discovering “Lady Janus’s” secrets and how she was connected to Sgt. Janus from the very first page. I was also interested in Joshua Hargreaves’ development as a character – and he does have his own arc throughout the stories – as well as that of two new characters, Valerie Havelock-Mayer and Wendy Jackson.

The third book, Sgt. Janus on the Dark Track, breaks again with traditional by giving us a full novel instead of a series of connected short stories. It’s not really a spoiler to say Sgt. Roman Janus is back (although I won’t reveal how) on the case. It’s no secret that I love epistolary novels, and Beard proves to be a master of the form. The events of Sgt. Janus’ ride on a very dark train are told through the journal entries, telegrams, letters, and newspaper clippings of several different characters (although  notably once again, never in the words of Janus himself) including Valerie Havelock-Mayer and Joshua Hargreaves and another interesting new character, Gabriel Butters. Dark Track is the most blatantly Gothic of the three books so far, replete with young virginal damsel in distress and unknowable supernatural entity and locations of great supernatural power, and again it all works.

Three books with three different narratorial approaches should be highly annoying to a series reader. We like consistency in the way a series’ individual entries are told. But Beard’s experimentation and willingness to take risks keeps the series fresh and keeps the reader on their toes. I really hope there are more Sgt. Janus volumes forthcoming, and cannot wait to see what new ways Beard finds to tell the tales.