The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to a creative and prolific author resident of Queensland. It was thanks to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that I became aware of him and his works, but I am glad I did. Here’s hoping some others might discover him by reading this brief.
Rather than comment separately on each of the titles in this remarkable series, it seemed best, and easiest for me, to present them as a whole accompanied by some general remarks to orient readers and remind me of what I have read. (Though I reserve the option of later reviewing an individual title or ten.) Impressive as the list is since 2011, for example, six full length novels appearing in 2025 alone, it is not the complete list of his publications. There are other genre novels apart from these. The total runs to at least forty (40)! It is best to read the list sitting down, least one grow faint. At this time there are thirty-three titles in the First Contact series, nearly all run to about 200 pages. Both this series and my reading are continuing.
The series is unified by its theme, namely First Contact between Earthlings and Aliens, a tried and true motif in science fiction since Murray Leinster’s eponymous story in 1945, though I suppose H G Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) is an earlier example. Each story is self-contained and there are no continuing characters or other continuities. It is a one-man anthology on its theme. Consider a comparison to a version of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in which each episode concerns First Contact. Each episode is distinct but all are written by the same author, yet there is no overlap of character, milieu, or circumstances in any of stories. Whew! What a feat of imagination! I know I have said that twice but it needs to be emphasised.
There are period pieces, set in ancient Greece, Renaissance England, and 1950s American suburbia. (None, in my ken, is set on the Sunshine Coast near the author.) Others occur in low Earth orbit or the distant and largely theoretical Oort Cloud and beyond. Sometimes the initiative is human, and sometimes not. The contact is an invasion at times, initiated by aliens or by Earthlings. At other times the contact is one-sided, not mutual. Some contacts are inert, but most are dynamic.
In every case the level of verisimilitude is high. The most impressive aspect of that is the ease with which, and no doubt it was not easy, Cawdron animates an American Congressional intern in one book, and a high school girl working at a fast food outlet in the next, an aging archeologist in German occupied Greece, a motivated Soviet astronaut doing the Cold War, an Elon Musk clone raiding employee pension funds, an early Renaissance witch-hunter looking for another victim, a general of the People’s Liberation Army who follows the Tao of Sun Tzu, innumerable scientists and several flygirls, and more than a few innocent bystanders swept up by events. Each has a distinctive voice and persona even if the appearance is but a cameo.
The Aliens from his mental zoo also take a variety of forms. Some are unseen, others are ectoplasm, some are grotesqueries, others humanoid. Often they are silent observers. In other novels the Aliens are represented by technology. On the occasions when the Aliens communicate, they have a tendency to lecture about our faults, though they are not nearly as preachy as so many ostensible science fiction stories are these days. Often they do not communicate.
In each case Cawdron digs into the context with a mass of details that provide a rich context whether it is the technology of deep space exploration, surviving in the wild hinterlands of the Sudanese desert, or watching a take-no-prisoners Congressional hearings in D.C. He displays an impressive amount of research for each tale and integrates it smoothly into the stories. That said, it is also true, especially in the earlier titles one character explains to another all the details generated by that research. TMI.
On the other hand, there are many finely judged insights. Here is an example. It is a commonality in science fiction that we Earthlings want and would benefit from advanced alien technology. Would we? Could we? Imagine a Stone Age man getting an iPhone. It is advanced, alien technology to be sure, but what is this man to do with it. Throw it at prey? Ditto this same alien giving an Surface tablet to Cicero. What would he do with it? Sit on for warmth while the battery lasted?
A few of the book are homages . The most obvious are pastiches of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as mediated by the film The Forbidden Planet (1956) and its Krell. These are, you guessed it, The Tempest and Little Green Men. All in all it would seem Cawdron is a reader as well as a writer, and one well-steeped in the science fiction library.
The ones I read during our month on the Gold Coast are shown in blue below. I particularly liked the three shown in bold bluebelow, but overall I must have liked them all because, as with Oliver Twist, I wanted more. And there are more for the reading! My work is not yet done. The table below indicates the scale of Caldron’s project. The varied settings, as indicated above, show the scope.
On a forgotten island somewhere in Oceania handful of European ex-pats wile away the time among several thousand natives. By a quirk of history, a Brit owns the island, being the third in line of succession since the islet was granted to his grandfather. He reports annually to a consulate miles away.
While the natives go about their own business except for a select few who act as servants for them the ex-pats pass the time in hobbies like painting, drinking alcohol, and making witty conversation. There is too much of the latter for this reader.
nto this edenic life blunders an outsider, whose lugger pulls into the bay, causing curiosity, consternation, and irritation to the residents. Who is it that would intrude on their retreat? It turns out to be a blustery know-it-all who upsets one and all.
We hardened krimi readers know he is for the chop and he is, but it takes a long time in coming.
Now the question is who done it? And why dun it? And does it matter since the victim was a such scumbag?
Was it the Lord and Master of the islet himself who would do a great deal to seal the island off from the outside world?
The windy, self-professed one-time sea captain who never went to sea?
The quartermaster who works for the Lord and Master, and whose background may not bear inspection?
The retired Scotland Yard detersive who came there to forget his own troubled past?
The retiring spinister who never answers a question about herself?
The doctor who seems wasted in this wasteland, but may be there for want of a better bolthole?
There are two or three more with similar questions handing over them.
Until the death of blowhard, Lord and Master was content not to ask any of them questions, but the death opened all quesitons, the most so when it appears to have been murder. Murder!
what follows is a puzzle of who was where when, and what motive might have led to the murder. At first this quest is pursued almost like a board game of Clue, but then… Yes, inevitably there is a second murder, and with the European population diminishing activity is increased.
Those deans of krimi-lit, Jacques Barzun and Wendelll Taylor describe is as a ‘masterpiece,’ and in a their very brief comment say it is ‘atmospheric,’ ‘entertaining,’ and ‘brilliant.’ This is high praise from these two.
The ten Good Riders who scored it at 3.20 are closer to my take on it. Several of these souls were led to it, as was I, by Barzun and Taylor.
I found the witty conversation tedious and the epistolary exposition at the denouncement artificial. Nor could this savant distinguish among the ex-pat characters very well. They blurred together to me. I needed a scorecard to separate them.
Paul McGuire may have beeb an Australian diplomat who worked in Oceania. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography there was a Dominic Mary Paul McGuire (1903-1978) who has a long entry and several publications are mentioned but not this one. I am not sure it is the same man, but if someone knows, contact me.
The genre is SoCal Noir, a murder mystery in the sunshine of Los Angeles city and county. Before going further about the book, a preliminary remark is in order to quell the pedants. Kenneth Millar insisted that his pseudonym, Ross Macdonald be spelled as it is here, no interior capital on that letter ‘d.’ He did that to distinguish the name from another murder mystery genre writer, that is, the John D. MacDonald with a pair of extravagant capital ‘D’s.’ However, all too frequently the author’s name gets the unwanted interior capital ‘D’ on some of the books. Moreover, the auto-complete and spell-checker have to be tamed to respect his wishes. So be it. But then a writer as famed as George Orwell fought and lost a similar battle when he insisted in the publishing contract that the title Nineteen Eighty-Four be spelled out in letters and not put into the numbers 1984. You would never know that to see this book on shelves or web pages. After some comments on The Instant Enemy, there is a further discussion of the author and his alter ego.
Since at least 624 BC, according to one pundit, the older generation has complained about the declining standard of rising generation, but in the middle 1960s that plaint was reversed for it was the rising generation whose members criticised their elders about anything and everything. This reversal of fortune was dubbed The Generation Gap, which was much discussed by talking heads in the late 1960s to explain anything and everything from Vietnam War protests to hair styles, flared trousers, and the popularity of the Beatles. This gap spawned a song, a television show, a board game, and a lot more ephemera some of which has endured. The Instant Enemy offers Macdonald’s take on it. In that Archer’s age, over thirty, makes him an instant enemy to members of that rising generation.
In the novel the rising generation is embodied by Young Davy and even younger Sandy, his squeeze, who together seem bound for mutually assured destruction while taking a few others with them. Yet both come from comfortable homes in the green fields of the land of dreams that is Southern California. Keith Sebastian, Sandy’s father calls in Lew Archer to find them and return Sandy home. While Sebastian offers an impressive front, it does not take Archer long to realise there is no back to this Hollywood façade.
Sebastian has failed to make the transition from a promising young businessman to a successful one. Behind the trophy wife Bernice, the ranch-style model home, and the new luxury car Archer finds a loveless marriage, a cold house, and piles of unpaid and overdue bills on that car and all the other ever so tasteful chattels that adorn the wife, the house, and the car. Sebastian dances a desperate attendance on his wealthy boss, Stephen Hackett, in the hope of…something, anything to get through another week or month to keep up appearances. Then the bad gets worse when Hackett is kidnapped at gunpoint by none other than the two delinquents, Davy and Sandy. Unbelievable but true.
Why?
It is a tangled skein and by the end a Mormon genealogical tree combined with a Lombardi Chart is necessary because the kidnapping was brewed over three generations in Macdonald’s laboratory where the retorts bubble with the ingredients of tragedy, in this case an unloved child, illicit drugs, adultery, betrayal, a surly subordinate, a very nice woman who knows too much, a venal older woman with a toy-boy husband, and assorted police officers including one whom Uri Geller could not straighten. The body count reaches Midsomer Murders heights while Archer develops, applies, tests, and rejects alternative hypotheses until finding one that fits.
While the cast of characters seems to consist of people with no connection to one another and with nothing in common, in fact, on that dark family tree, they are entwined by marriage, adultery, illegitimacy, and murder, the latter being the strongest bond.
In addition to the two teenage rebels with a cause, Macdonald also adds some Cain and Abel. And as frequently the case in his novels, there is a black widow who has consumed two husbands. Without a doubt there be critics in the firmament who would label him a misogynist for this. Happy are the labellers. Happier still are the readers who suspend such swift and simple judgements.
Outside this terrarium of vipers and apart from the lost teenagers, Archer meets some very solid citizens: Alma in the nursing home who truly cares for her charges, a school guidance counsellor who goes beyond the call of duty, a security guard who keeps his word come what may, many others who lend a land, like the truck driver who finds a stunned Archer on the highway, Al at the sandwich bar, and a nameless gas pump jockey with a calliper on his leg, each of whom reminds both Archer and the reader of all the decent people out there. It is a distinguishing feature of Macdoanld’s fiction that these minor supporting characters, as many as twenty in each book, are endowed with personalities. None are plot cardboard. The contract could be the BBC’s Christopher Foyle (an avatar for this all-too-common stereotype) where virtually everyone but the sainted hero himself is a liar, cheat, murderer, traitor or all three in one. Archer is secure in his own identity and modest virtue, having no need to denigrate all others to be singular.
Macdonald’s imagery at times transcends the story. Savour these opening lines from The Galton Case(1959): The law offices were above a savings bank on the main street of Santa Teresa. A private elevator lifted you from a mean lobby into an atmosphere of elegant simplicity, creating the impression that you were rising effortlessly to the level you deserved, one of the chosen. Or the time when Archer admits to himself that he likes the work, late at night, driving from one place to another like an antigen connecting cells in the great body of Southern California. He is a healer; we may hope, one of many, assuaging some of the injuries we do to ourselves.
Trolls should be warned that these pages reflect the manners and mores of the time and place. These are guaranteed to offend some sensitive souls. These trumpeter swans can be found venting on Good Reads.
* * *
The Midsomer Murders mayhem occurs off the page and Archer himself seldom carries a gun. Indeed, having read all eighteen titles, several more than once, I am not sure he ever fired a bullet, though his own licensed gun is stolen and used in a murder in The Way Some People Die (1951). Still less does he come up smiling after beatings, druggings, pistol-whippings, or woundings as does Philip Marlowe in the novels of Raymond Chandler. On the rare occasions when he is assaulted, as occurs in these pages, it takes him some time to recover, because he is not the man of steel that Marlowe was.
If Raymond Chandler had a screenwriter’s ear for dialogue, Ross Macdonald had a jeweller’s eye for imagery. There is seldom a wasted word on his pages. If he pauses to describe the fittings and furnishings of the Sebastians’ home or the make and model of their car in The Instant Enemy, a reader can be sure those facts will be rebound in the pages that follow, so pay attention.
Sometimes Macdonald’s metaphors and images come so thick and fast that they create a traffic jam in the reader. Sometimes the psychologising slows the momentum of the story. And sometimes there are missteps. Fortunately, Macdonald follows the old coach’s wisdom: ‘Forget the mistakes and keep trying.’
The species into which cataloguers slot Macdonald’s novels is styled ‘Hard Boiled,’ but he offers neither the snappy dialogue of Chandler nor the bone-deep cynicism of Dassiell Hammet, the double litmus tests for Hard Boiled. Though it is true that Lew Archer is named for Sam Spade’s deceased partner, Miles Archer, who only believed in fifty-dollar bills, and was sired on Hammet’s typewriter.
While Macdonald’s The Underground Man (1971) earned a rave review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review section by that distinguished southern American novelist Eudora Welty (though I confess that I could not finish the only book of hers I tried). Yet none of his novels was ever awarded the paramount prize of the Edgar. To be sure he garnered many other awards, but not that crown of crowns. Such is the way of the world.
In his books, unlike life, the world bends towards justice of a kind, but there are seldom happy endings. Perhaps Macdonald wrote one book eighteen times, as has been said, the same story of twisted love, divided loyalties, the effects of the sins of the past, wayward offspring, fractured families, irresponsible parents, each magnified by the glare of money in the prism of California sunshine that blinded the individuals to their own motives and deeds. It was all one case.
By number eighteen in the sequence the biggest mystery is Lewis Archer himself about whom the reader learns almost nothing, being a man without a past. There are only a few shards with information scratched on them scattered through the books. In The Goodbye Look (1969) we learn he had been a soldier who has seen that last look on faces of men who died. In The Drowning Pool (1950) there is mention of a wife named Sue who left him because of his irregular life. In The Doomsters (1958) he refers to his police work in Long Beach. In another he has a sexual dalliance with a witness that goes nowhere. In Black Money (1966) the names of the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Henri Bergson pass his lips. These gleanings are few and far between.
The reader is not manipulated into feeling sorry for him with a back sob story that reveals his feet of clay. Why should we? Archer does not feel sorry for himself! He is no Heathcliff forever lamenting his fate. Archer’s emphasis is on the other people in the story, not on himself. He remains in the shadows to observe and report not to take the limelight.
He has neither the finicky mien of Colin Dexter’s Endeavour Morse, nor the quirky car of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. Here, then, is a challenge for a Post Modernist to dissolve the twinned author Macdonald-Millar and write a biography of Lew Archer himself. The Wikipedia entry, and yes there is one, marks the starting line, not the finishing line in his life story.
This title was number fourteen of the eighteen, with a nineteenth incomplete at his death. Each stands alone but bound together they are Lew Archer’s life. Oh, and there are collections of short stores (some of which germinated into the novels) called The Name is Archer (1955) joined by Lew Archer Private Investigator (1977). When an apprentice Macdonald published stories featuring other characters, some of which have been reissued as though they were Archer stories, again despite his objections. Macdonald wrote at least two crime novels without Archer.
Connoisseurs may note that the doyens of detective fiction, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor in their massive reference work describe this novel as ‘good,’ but offer greater praise for Macdonald’s The Ivory Grin (1952), The Galton Case (1959), and The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962). The one that resonated the most on first reading and which has stayed with me is the last one, The Blue Hammer (1976).
Equally, Barzun and Taylor also reprove other Macdonald’s titles for overcooked plots and broken metaphors. Indeed, some of the plots, like that of The Goodbye Look require a GPS, that is a Genre Plotting System, to follow through a forest of grafted family trees and generations of undergrowth.
There is a great deal of literature on Macdonald and Archer’s world. Impressive as it is, to read it is to lose sight of the novels themselves. Too often the dissection of scholars leaves behind only the odour of formaldehyde. But perhaps it is justice since Macdonald as Millar earned a PhD in English at the University of Michigan.
Only a few films have been made, despite the obvious appeal of the material and the setting. Some say Macdonald was reluctant to surrender control of the stories but, just maybe, it was a spectral Archer himself who objected, despite the money on offer, to preserve his own identity and integrity. He was right to do so because one film version changed Archer’s name to facilitate marketing, and another moved the locale from SoCal to NOLA, that is New Orleans. Both decomposed the interwoven psychological themes to mere dollars and cents and so reduce the characters’ motivations to the supermarket mundane. These movies are Harper(1966), based on The Moving Target (1949) and The Drowning Pool (1975), based on the 1950 novel of that name. Both were vehicles for Paul Newman’s blinding star power.
Seek and ye shall also find a made-for-television movie called The Underground Man (1974) mutated from that novel, but it is larded with the tropes of television cop shows at the expense of the psychological depth or the intensity of the original. It starred a miscast Peter Graves as Archer. Even more woefully miscast was Brian Keith as Archer in the eponymous short-lived six-episode television series of 1975. Neither actor had the anonymous, everyman quality of Archer nor the compensating gravitas of Paul Newman. In addition, Macdonald’s storylines, perhaps without royalties, have also found their way in Russian and French films according to the IMDb.
If it has not been clear in the foregoing verbiage, the purpose of these musings has been to alert readers to the corpus of Archer stories in the hope that some might a sample and find it to their liking. His novels are readily available in whatever form a reader might like from bytes to MP3 to hard and soft covers, new and used.
Sources:
Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres, Rev. ed, (1989).
Mathew Bruccoli, Ross Macdonald (1984).
Michael Kreyling, The Novels of Ross Macdonald (2005).
Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels in publication order:
Paul Nelson and Kevin Averey, It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives (2016).
Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999).
Bernard Schopen, Ross Macdonald (1990).
Eudora Welty, ‘The Stuff that Nightmares are Made of,’ New York Times, Book Review (14 February 1971), page 1.
Michael Jackson has no memory of why, where, when, and which Archer novel he read first, but it must have been sometime in the mid-1970s, and one was not enough! Since then, he has read all of them, and the short stories, and Kenneth Millar’s other books, and some of the twenty-seven by his wife Margaret Millar. Imagine the clickety-clack of typewriters in that Santa Barbara household.
The Black Eyed Blonde (London: Mantle, 2014) by Benjamin Black
Chandler Redux
Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot have transcended their originators, Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Other writers have, within the limits of copyright laws, revived these two fictional detectives and put them back to work. And they are not alone; the one-named Spenser of Robert Parker, Jim Chee of Tony Hillerman, and Evariste Pel of Mark Hebden, all have had second and third reincarnations. Philip Marlowe, sprung from the brow of Raymond Chandler, joined these ranks in 2014 when The Black Eyed Blonde appeared from the keyboard of Benjamin Black. This is a Marlowe who is older but no wiser than he should be.
His rebirth begins with these lines:
‘It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you start to wonder if the earth has stopped spinning. The telephone on my desk looks like it knows it’s being watched. Traffic trickles by below, and a few men in hats are going nowhere.’
So observes Philip Marlowe from the window of office 615 in the Cuenga Building.
Thus begins another day without another dollar for him. It is some months after the events described in The Long Goodbye of 1953.
Welcome to the mean streets of a sweltering Bay City (aka Santa Monica), a crime noir in the sunshine state of California, a few miles south are the mystic lands of Mexico. Marlowe wallows in an enervated ennui when the bell above the outer office door tinkles, announcing the femme fatale’s entrance. With the relaxed casualness of the entitled, Mrs. Clare Cavendish hires Marlowe to find a missing lover, one Mr. Nico Peterson. Asked about him, she seems to know little, as if to say, ‘So hard to keep track of them, my harem.’
Her insouciance about a lover is both deflating and alluring to Marlowe. This sublime siren, exuding a heady elixir of pheromones, needs no song to attract this man. The spy-beautiful Clare is never far from his thoughts (and dreams) hereafter while he tracks the elusive Mr. Peterson through beatings, pistol whippings, sappings, police interrogations, torture, gun shots, and Mickey Finns — the usual noir menu of mayhem and murder. This detective has the constitution of fiction. The body count reaches six or was it seven? So hard to keep track of them.
This Marlowe smokes and drinks a little less than Chandler’s and is less inclined to mouth the sexist, ageist, racist, homophobic, and other prejudices of the 1950s though some of the other characters do that. Even if Marlowe has been laundered, there is still plenty to offend those eager for offence. Mexicans are Wetbacks. Homosexual muscle men are weak at the core. The essence of a woman is sex. Laundered Marlowe is, but dry cleaned no. Set-in stains remain.
Plot, situation, characters have echoes in Chandler’s backlist. There is a stifling conservatory, a histrionic sibling, assorted alcoholics, an overbearing parent, and bushels of money which has not bought or brought happiness. His case files include a missing sister and a rare coin. As he mopes about this damsel sans distress, this Mrs Cavendish, when he gets to the bottom of a gimlet, his thoughts turn to the recently departed Terry Lennox. (Marlowe’s thoughts also turn to that absent woman in his life who is not named until late in the piece but we all know it is Linda Loring who has found him so irresistible that she had to fled to Paris.)
Bay City remains the sunny sin city of Chandler’s creation, where everything has a price and nothing has a value. Beneath the blinding sunlight of day bubbles a sewer.
The plot is a Möbius strip. As with Chandler, the savour lies in the journey, not the arrival: the snappy dialogue and evocative descriptions. Above all, the picture of Marlowe, in the words of the 1940 song, ‘bewitched, bothered, and bewildered’ by that Cavendish woman is worth the cover price. Moreover, the ending is a corker when the sixth and last dead man exits. With O’Henry irony, the one person who survives, scared but unscathed, is Mr Nico Peterson, a premature report of whose death had stymied Marlowe’s initial efforts.
The descriptions, the dialogue, the musings on the trek are savoury. Here are a few of lesbons motsto whet the appetite for the whole repast:
– ‘Using my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me-I’m-a-detective voice.’
– ‘Treading gracefully on her own shadow.’
– ‘Belief is not part of my program.’
– ‘The world is porous; things trickle through all by themselves, or so it always seems.’
–‘I would have gone to her if she’d been calling from the dark side of the moon.’
– ‘Once you think a thing, it stays thought.’
There are plenty more of such strokes to reward a reader.
Had I to make a criticism, it would be that the relentless over-description of the clothes everyone wears, including Marlowe himself; it is done so repeatedly and so mechanically — upwards to twenty times on my count — that it blunts any impact. Done a few times when the clothes tell the reader something of the person or situation, and it scores points. When it is done again and again, well, the edge dulls. The same can be said of the descriptions of fittings and furnishing of rooms. These, too, are piled high. Once or twice these descriptions add perspective but after that they become padding. Black must have done a lot of research in back issues of Vogue, Esquire, McCalls, and Interiors, magazines. TMI!
While in the pedant’s corner, note that Trans-Canada Air Lines did not brand itself Air Canada until 1965, and it did not fly non-stop from Los Angeles to Toronto in the middle 1950s, contrary to these pages. Moreover, all beaches in California are public up to the mean tide line. Ergo the Cavendishes did not have private sand. There is another false note that involves the plot, and it is best to say only that it involves Mrs. Cavendish and her younger brother in the finalé.
Benjamin Black is a pseudonym for the Irish novelist John Banville, who is the master of several genres, including this one with his own crime series featuring Dr. Quirke (who like Spenser is a man with only one name) of 1950s Dublin. When The Black Eyed Blonde appeared, it was heralded as Book One of Marlowe Lazarus, implying that there would be a Book Two. It is disappointing to say now, ten years later, though it was widely and warmly reviewed and went through many editions, printings, media, and translations, that the implicit promise has not been fulfilled. Alas! One can dream of what Banville might have done in a pastiche of Chandler’s short story ‘The Red Wind,’ a personal favourite.
On the marketplace of ideas of Good Reads the book at hand scores 3.5 / 5.0 from 4,515 scorers. There is the usual range, which I sampled by reviewing those who scored it ‘1.’ A few of these latter scorers offered explanatory comments: the major theme is the desecration of an icon. ‘How dare Banville offer a Marlowe who differs slightly from my image of him!’ Well, he dared. His Marlowe has grown, and with growth he has changed a little. Black’s Marlowe is more introspective and more vulnerable than he was decades earlier. Aren’t we all?
Other Good Readers’ pearls included the remark, surely something we all wanted to know, ‘I hate noir’ followed by ‘I hate the fifties.’ Then there were sensitive souls whose overflowing virtue required them to sniff at the residual sexism, racism, and smoking in the story. These ‘ism’s,’ evidently it needs to be said, were of the time and are to be found aplenty in the Chandler oeuvre. Be warned trolls of delicate virtue.
There are two cautionary notes. (1) In reviews, advertising, and catalogue listings, sometimes ‘Black-eyed’ is hyphenated and sometimes not. It is the same book with or without the hyphen. (2) However, this book is not to be confused with Erle Stanley Garner’s Perry Mason vehicle The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde(1944) in which the compound adjective is definitely hyphenated, as it should be. By the way, Garner’s connect-the-dots story scores higher, albeit with fewer raters, on Good Reads than Black’s. Chandlerholics will also note that Black’s title had an incarnation in Benjamin Schutz’s short story ‘The Black Eyed Blonde’ in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (1988) which has a different plot, and no hyphen.
Vigilant readers will know that Black’s Black Eyed Blonde is credited as the alleged origin of the screenplay for a feature-length film called ‘Marlowe’ in 2022, starring Liam Neeson as the titular Marlowe. He is the latest in a long line of Marlowe impersonators, per the table below. Marlowe has also been animated on radio, podcasts, CDs, and audiobooks galore by Ed Bishop, Van Heflin, Gerald Mohr, and others. Then there are the innumerable translations.
Note: in some renderings Phillip has a double ‘l’ which it did not have in Chandler’s spelling.
Year
Actor
Age
Title
IMDb
Rating
1944
Dick Powell
40
Murder, My Sweet
7.5
1946
Humphrey Bogart
47
The Big Sleep
7.9
1946
Robert Montgomery
43
The Lady in the Lake
6.5
1947
George Montgomery
31
The Brasher Doubloon
6.5
1959-1960
Phillip Carey
35
Philip Marlowe (TV series)
7.1
1969
James Garner
35
Marlowe
6.4
1973
Elliot Gould
35
The Long Goodbye
7.5
1978
Robert Mitchum
61
The Big Sleep
5.8
1975
Robert Mitchum
58
Farewell, My Lovely
7.0
1983-1986
Powers Boothe
38
Philip Marlowe: Private Eye (TV series)
7.7
1998
James Caan
58
Poodle Springs
6.0
2022
Liam Neeson
70
Marlow
5.4
Note: In 1942 both Lloyd Nolan at 40 and George Sanders at 36 used the plot of, respectively, The High Window and Farewell My Lovely, but not the Marlowe name for Time to Kill and The Falcon Takes Over.
To say the obvious, Robert Mitchum alone has impersonated Marlowe twice. The actors who have donned his persona have ranged from a boyish 31 to a decrepit 70. Marlowe has also been black, played by Danny Glover (1995) in The Red Wind an episode on the television anthology Fallen Angels, and – wait for it – he has travelled to the mean streets of Prague in Smart Philip (2005) and Tokyo in The Long Goodbye (2014) and a cameo in an episode of Bitter Blood (2014) as Tokyo Marlowe. Surely in an age when identity is subjective, it is time for a queer and female Marlowe or both in one.
Bibliography
Byron Preiss, ed., Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration (1988).
Benjamin Black, Christine Falls (2006). The first novel featuring Dr Quirke.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953) and ‘The Red Wind’ (1938), a short story.
Erle Stanley Garner, The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde (1944).
Frank McShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (1976).
Richard Rodgers, Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, a song from from Pal Joey (1940).
———
Michael Jackson read The Long Goodbye while a penurious grad student pecking out a dissertation on Aristotle and overnight became a Chandler addict. He bought a copy of the book at hand on Grafton Street in Dublin in 2014.
Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.66 by 372 litizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Species: Venice, death in
Verdict: What a chameleon.
Tagline: He didn’t do it, but it was done.
Book and author
Author and wife go on a belated honeymoon to Venice in January 1899. She is an heiress to a great railway fortune and from the get-go strangely withdrawn, as she has been since her wedding day six months before. Of the wedding night, there has been no connubial bliss, nor any since then. (Look it up, Mortimer!) Moreover, she has now been written out of her magnate’s will in favour of her dowdy sister.
Thomas Cook has made all the first class travel and accommodation arrangements which were paid much earlier. Even so, damp, grey, cold, vaporous Venice is not welcoming to his senses. Don’t Look Now! To this, as to all else, Wife is indifferent. His efforts, few and feeble, to communicate with her are met with silence. Was it something he said? No onions next time!
They move into a cavernous palazzo on the Grand Canal and meet their landlord who is like someone from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, a veritable grandee, or maybe he is an escaped extra from a Fellini movie. The palazzo has faded glory but neither heating, running water, nor plumbing. It is the true Venice experience.
At the start I thought I had grokked a homage to Henry James, in particular the Aspern Papers (1888), with the dependent sub-clauses from dependent clauses, attached to qualifying phrases in sentences that threaten to run-over the page. But not quite. Well, yes, some sentences did spill over the page, but it is not Henry James, whose genius was implicit, not explicit. I thought of that when I read the detailed description of the rape in marriage that the Author-husband exacted. Such might have been part of a James plot, but it would not have had a four-page description, but would have occurred off the page but nonetheless have been manifest. Well, not everyone is a genius.
After the rape, Wife scoots and Author, now ashamed, wanders around Venice, where he encounters an old school mate and his ravishing sister. In fact, he met them the night of the aforementioned event. Thereafter he makes few and feeble efforts to find Wife and lusts for sister who leads by his first friend.
There unfolds in the last few chapters a denouement that this jadded lag did not see coming, and it is a stunner. Indeed! It is convoluted but makes perfect sense in hindsight. Though perhaps it does depend on Author being dimwitted. And, well, six months!
A vocabulary builder: eructation, purblind, crapulous, plangency, and contemnor. This last ‘contemnor’ is used to mean someone who has contempt for some object or person. Uh uh, in a dictionary it means someone whom a court has found guilty of contempt. Iffy.
I had just finished re-reading Banville’s (as Benjamin Black) Black-eyed Blonde, marvelling as his ability to channel, and surpass, Raymond Chandler, when entering a bookstore in Bowral, this title greeted my eye. It seemed obvious I should read it, so I did. This time Banville came to the costume party as Henry James reviviscere.
Spoiler, big time. Close eyes if you are going to read the book. If I have made the right inferences, it goes like this. Father denies Wife permission to marry scoundrel Redhead. She then marries the Father-acceptable Author as a foil. However, she still falls out with Father. Why I don’t know. She then murders her father by staging an accident, and is surprised, though shows nothing, to find she has been disinherited despite marrying the dud Author. The considerable everything goes to Dowdy sister. Wife then manoeuvres husband in name only Author into the belated Honeymoon in Venice, planned and paid for before Father’s death. They have had sex only once the night before the marriage. So it has been a six-month dry spell for him. In Venice by arrangement Redhead and his Ravishing Sister insinuate themselves into the dim Author’s company. Wife goes missing as above. The Dowdy sister arrives and confronts Author over missing Wife. This argument is witnessed by many. She sics the police onto him. Then Dowdy Sister has a convenient fatal accident arranged by Wife. Now suspicion falls on Author for both the missing Wife and the deceased Dowdy sister. But wait, all along Wife has been sheltering at the British Consulate with a story of the rape as above. (Her plot did not depend on this rape, she could have faked it, or foregone it, but once it was done it integrated into the scheme.) All the while Ravishing sister has led Author by his member, while the RedHead manoeuvres around him insuring witnesses. Maids and such know of the unconsummated liaison with ravishing sister, which provides a motive, first, for disappearance of Wife, later to be supplanted by the rape, and, second, the murder the Dowdy sister who threatens exposure in suspicion that he has murdered Wife. In the end Author is not arrested since there is no evidence but sent off in shame, penniless. Wife inherits what Dowdy sister got from mega-bucks Father and marries scoundrel RedHead. Turns out Ravishing sister was married to consular official who connived in the plot in return for a healthy cut of the swag.
Connect those dots! That is a plot worthy of the darkest noir. Wife, redhead, sister, and diplomat conspired to murder dowdy heiress and implicate Author-husband. I think that’s it.
The Black-eyed Blonde (2014) by Benjamin Black (John Banville)
Genre: krimi; Species: California noir; Genus: Marlowe.
Good Reads meta-data is 289 pages rated 3.53 by 4,484 litizens.
Verdict: Pitch perfect.
Tagline: Better Chandler than Chandler.
During a SoCal summer heatwave, Phillip Marlowe’s office just got hotter still when Clare Cavendish entered. It was lust at first sight for the tough guy who turned to putty.
This homage picks up Marlowe after The Long Goodbye (1953) and spins a plot out of the stuff that nightmares are made of. It is quite a ride.
The femme fatale is on song. Marlowe’s only friend is more a frenemy. A clue for those with a long memory: Jim Bouton.
However, I did find the persistent and mechanical descriptions of everyone’s clothing tiresome, repetitive, and pointless. Take that.
I have commented on this book before and I cannot add anything more. However, I did entertain myself by reading the one measly star reviews on Good Reads. These raters must have a lot to compensate for given how idiotic their comments are. ‘He doesn’t drink enough to be Marlowe.’ ‘He’s too tall to be Marlowe.’ ‘He’s not bitter enough to be Marlowe.’ And so on. Others offered such insights as ‘I hate the 1950s.’ Take that! Or, ‘I dislike noir fiction.’ What a waste of pixels.
Good Reads Meta-data is 149 pages rated 3.80 by 390 litizens.
Genre: ScFI; Species: Hard.
Verdict: Oh Hum.
Tagline: Slam, wham, and bam. Repeat.
Earth’s first human mission to Jupiter gets caught in the crossfire of a labour dispute between the corporations on Earth that own the asteroid Ceres and the mineral riches it contains and the indentured colonists who work it. The Jupiter bound spacecraft is called Odyssey and it becomes a hostage of sorts in the negotiations.
Not on my watch, declares Captain McGiver of Odyssey and he makes it so with some mumble-jumbo, low-gravity athletics, and the help of A.I.
There are pages and pages describing the Odyssey, the asteroid, and the mining equipment on it, and how Captain makes use of it to foil the rebels’ hold on Odyssey. He has no interest either way in their cause; he just wants to complete the Jovian jaunt.
Chose it because the title reminded me of Homer’s wine dark sea and the name Odyssey appeared to confirm the reference. There the parallels ended.
The conclusion is a reference to the further perils in the series. Odyssey will have further adventures before returning to Ithaca.
Hard Science Fiction seems to mean a lot of pointless (as to plot or character) technical details. This is the Geordie-speak of Star Trek Voyager. Filler.
IMDb meta-data is 6 episodes of 50m rated 6.8 by 538 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: French
Verdict: I liked it.
Tagline: Justice of a kind.
Le brigade crim.
These comments are reactions to the first two episodes that comprise a homage to George’s Simenon, Maigret and the Lazy Burglar:Maigret et le Voleur paresseux (1961). But I have seen all six episodes and they are cut from the same cloth.
Maigret investigates not one but two serious crimes, and no they do not merge into one, as is usual in that trope, but each distracts his attention from the other. (Parallel investigations figures in all three stories, each divided into two parts. Ergo, in all, the six episodes cover three stories.)
But other usual tropes prop-up the plot: interference from outside, uncooperative colleagues, micromanagement from above, stress in his home life, and, well, this is a new one, bad dreams.
To enjoy this version, and I did, it is necessary to relinquish one’s image of Maigret and his world. This is a renovation with mod cons. There are cell phones, slave cameras, iris scans, smart houses, digital data, motion sensors, forensic science, and computers here and there with Facebook and social influencers. But so far no Ubers, no smartwatches….no A.I.
This clone has neither the bulk (as did Michael Gambon) nor the inwardness (as did Rowan Atkinson) of Maigret. (Bruno Cremer had both bulk and depth.) Yes, I know, this one doesn’t talk much but his silence does not convey depth so much as petulance. In this I agree with the prosecutor: No team player this one. I did grow irritated by satellites asking him ‘Where are you going?’ and his not answering as he walks away to prove how enigmatic he is. On the subject of annoying fillers, there were far too many ‘I’m sorry’ about anything and everything. (‘Sorry’ used to mean ‘I won’t do it again,’ now it means little more than ‘Oops.’) But he does have the currently de rigour designer fuzz to show he is a man of these times of gender fluidity.
What the episodes offer is a travelogue of Paris via Budapest, and puzzles to solve. The acting is superb, from the lazy burglar to the effete business man, the local inspector, and the leads.
Bruno Cremer as Jules Maigret
However, it seemed to this viewer that there were loose plot ends flapping in the breeze. Among them are the following: How did the effete business man subdue the experienced criminal? How did he lift the body into the boot of the car? Why was there no forensic examination of the floor rug or the car boot? Was it with a flying carpet that the businessman left prison? LOL Did the helicopter pilot just sit and wait for arrest? The story muddles the relationship between police and prosecutor. Maigret covered for Cavre who didn’t seem to realise it. (He remains an annoying cardboard foil in subsequent episodes.) Though the re-enactment compensated a bit. If that spindly woman clonked the burglar, is she still in jail. I lost track.
I found comparable loose ends in all the stories.
There is no rest for a detective out of copyright, and there have been numerous British versions, Irish, Austrian, German, Italian, Russian, Dutch, and Japanese, oh, and yes, French. (I can’t find any American rendering, but no doubt it has been done.) Many liberties have been taken, about the only constant is the pipe and it appears here as a talisman. (I liked the silent joke about the pipe in a later episode.)
Bruno Cremet is ot in this group of Maigret’s. He is the only Maigret to do the complete works.
I wonder if this effort to update and refresh Maigret was inspired by the renaissance of Sherlock (2010). It is certainly a comparable effort. But it lacks the superb soundtrack that energised Sherlock.
I stuck with it for the lot. If the intention is to do the complete oeuvre then another fifty or so tales are in the pipeline.
Good Reads meta-data is 124 pages, rated 4.03 by 1,806 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Austrian.
Verdict: Brilliant!
Tagline: The Colossus of Europe
Desiderius Erasmus’s (1469-1536) home was Europe where he spoke no living European language, but only the universal Latin. He conquered Europe with his intellect, as Charlemagne had done with his sword and the Hanseatic League had with the abacus, from Rotterdam where he fell to earth, Louvain, Bruges, London, Paris, Mainz, Cambridge, Bologna, Cologne, Venice, Basel, and many points between all of these. Imagine the stamps in his passport. His broad mind and his pan European life made it appropriate to use his name for the Erasmus+ Program (European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) (in a backronym) to facilitate education, training, youth and sport for students in thirty-three European nations.
He was a public intellectual avant le mot. Besought at times by the kings of both England and France, the emperor of the Germans, the Pope of Romans, and countless princelings as an adornment to their menageries, he lived by grace and favour with greater grace and favour than he received. It is a measure of the fame of this praeceptor mundi that Hans Holbein did six portraits of him, Albrecht Dürer two; Quentin Matsys another. By contrast Niccolò Machiavelli, his contemporary, was never painted from life, nor ever by artists of such renown.
General Erasmus and book.
Erasmus led an army of books in battle on page after page with artillery of his pen captured one mental fort after another. He was the generalissimo of the Republic of Letters in his day and age.
About half of Zweig’s book is a comparison and contrast between Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, the former a cosmopolitan, the latter a rustic; the former a sickly reed, the latter a thickset lumberjack, the former an alchemist with words, the latter a blacksmith; the former recoiled from tumult, the latter revelled the murder of his enemies; the former an apostle of free will, the latter a celebrant of determinism; the former wholly committed to being noncommittal, the latter fully committed to being fully committed. (My only previous encounter with the ghost of Martin Luther was reading Erik Erikson’s 1958 psychological biography of the man Young Man Luther in graduate school a few years ago. All I can recall from that is Luther’s gargantuan ego.)
I regret that while in Basel once upon a time I had neither the wit nor the wisdom to visit Erasmus House.
The book is not a chronological biography but rather a personality study of these two protagonists. In that it is magnificent, having whet my appetite for a chronological biography of Erasmus. By the way this exercise reminded me that in high school I read The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) by Charles Reade, though I now recall nothing of it but the title and its connection to Erasmus.
Zweig (1881-1942) wielded thunderbolt prose. His words rise off the page to meet the reader halfway most often through antinomies, apparent contradictions that engage that spark a reaction. At other times it seems he is whispering into the ear of the reader with a quiet urgency. His pages seem to live, breath, and quiver with life. He wrote biographies, history, and fiction. We saw his play Beware of Pity (1939) a few years ago performed by an Austrian company. It gripped me.
If Erasmus was at home wherever he had a writing desk, ink, and quill, Zweig was not. Austria topped Germany in its anti-semitism by the latter 1930s and with the coming of the Anschluss he immigrated to Brazil (via family connections) with his wife. There he made an effort to learn Portuguese and to fit in, but failed, and he felt like what he was, an unwilling exile in a strange land, vast not compact, moist and verdant, not glacial and snow capped, and so on, and in 1942 the two of them committed suicide.
Good Reads meta-data is 292 pages, rated 4.29 by 24 litizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: AI
Verdict: It’s all in the title.
Tagline: She did it!
A parable about identity.
In a university library a man gropes a … robot, and it whacks him. This robot is the titular Emily. Oops! All of this is apparent from the security video of the incident. ‘Robot strikes man!’ screamed the ABC News bulletin, and not ‘Man molests robot.’
I know Frat boys are hard on and up most of the time but groping a metallic androgynous robot seems desperate even for one of them. How did he even know in the silence of the reading room it was a she, Emily? So what’s with groper? Near sighted as well as desperate? Does this make sense? Read on.
In this fictional world there are tens of millions of 1.0 robots that look and act like robots. Think Robbie’s descendants and you’ve got them. Now Apple has introduced 2.0 robots that still look like robots, but with integrated A.I. that allows for these model 2.0s to learn and develop. These 2.0 Robbie’s have been to school! One of those, as it turns out, is the aforementioned Emily.
Whatever!
It is a violation for a robot, however provoked, and what is so provocative about steel being touched anyway, to harm a human. Lawgiver Asimov made that the first precept. The penalty is to erase the robot’s memory, the personality, and reprogram the shell. Goodbye, Emily. To avoid this fate perpetrator Emily goes on the run. It seems AI has a selfish gene that wants to survive. (This app insisted on a capital after the period I put after the I in AI. The only way to get into lower case was to omit the period. Is this another example of the rule of A.I.)
Meanwhile, the McKinsey management of Apple is frantic to shift the blame for this malfunction on to… anyone else. Blame-shifting is a required minor in all accredited business degrees. But first the fugitive bot must be found. Both missions – shifting the blame and finding the runaway ‘bot — are landed on the design engineer of model 2.0. Though his expertise plays no role in what follows.
Engineer’s head is spinning with the unexpected, unwelcome, and upsetting news that a 2.0 has harmed a human being; he is nonplussed. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that if he cannot find the missing ‘bot, whom we know as Emily, and find out what permitted the Em to strike the man, Engineer will (1) be fired, (2) become a pariah, (3) and be arrested as complicit in the offence. And (4) he will be required to watch endless speeches from that idiot whose name shall never cross my keyboard.
Meanwhile, the free press beats the story to death with the sense of proportion and social responsibility we now expect: none. Pitchforks in hand, brandishing torches vigilantes turn on robots. Just for fun Pox News stokes the fire by calling them socialist robots! (Makes as much sense as anything else on Pox News.
If you were a runaway robot, where would you hide? Yep. Right. Where there a lot of other robots, because, well, they all look alike.
Now we take a sharp turn away from the mystery of finding the rogue to discover that all of this is only preliminary.
What follows is a court case to decide what a person is, and whether Emily has the rights of a person. Is she the Rosa Parks of metallic A.I.? A non-person who might be gavelled into being one by a judicial ruling? Discussing these points occupies more than half the book.
But wait!
Enter Perry Mason!
If Em goes to trial it would have to be a jury of peers. Yes? But she has no peers. She is no Shylock – neither tickled nor bled. There is nothing about this obvious point in the book but it came to my mind. Why isn’t the jury made up of robots? Good question, Mortimer. Collect the law degree on the way out.
Nor did I fathom why Engineer showed zero interest in Emily’s library assault. Indeed why was Em sitting in the library? One of the best ways to find out something is to ask. Why didn’t he? The voltes faces of first the lawyer and then the judge were too easy. However I did like the shelter for unwanted bots.
Here’s a new twist for me. I finished the book, and when I did a message arrived on the Kindle screen telling me there was an additional chapter if I wanted to read it. Big decision, right. I read it. How does that work in the printed book?
It resolves into a take on the Isaac Asimov story ‘Evidence’ (1954) for the cognoscenti that is a spoiler. In this context it undermines just about the whole book.
Francis Malka
Not sure what to make of the idea of two endings. Seems the author should decide on one, not me.
Quibbling aside, it is an inventive book that kept me reading.
