Good Reads meta-data is 304 pages, rated 3.51 by 3,483 litizens.
Genre: Krimi: Species: Sunshine Noir.
Verdict: Brilliant, in a word. * * * * More, please!
Never thought I would say that a Chandler imitator bettered the master, but here it is. This is Philip Marlowe in the California sunshine of 1947 and he is in top form! This novel might as well be a lost manuscript of Chandler’s come to light, such a ring of the master does it have.
Every page crackles with sharp asides, deadpan dialogue, and show stopping imagery. Here is a sampler.
‘The telephone on the desk has the air of something that knows it is being watched.’
‘I was about to use my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me, I’m-a-private-detective voice’ but she didn’t wait for it.
‘…there was someone else, and now I knew who it was. I’d known for some time, I suppose, but you can know something and at the same time, not know it. It’s one of the things that help us put up with our lot life…’
‘That’s a possibility I’d rather not have entertained. But once you think a thing, it stays thought.’
He had such an easy charm ‘you’d find yourself inquiring if he was all right and saying you hoped he hadn’t strained his wrist by having to keep that heavy-looking gun trained on you…’
‘The mist clung to my face like a wet scarf.’
‘My eyes felt like they had been lightly roasted in front of an open fire.’
‘I saw him walking down the street the other day and he didn’t look dead at all.’
‘I’m the hired help, but you’re talking to me like someone you’ve known all your life, or someone you’d like to know for the rest it. What gives?’
‘I stand at the window a lot contemplating the world and its ways.’
‘I don’t know your name,’ I said. ‘No you don’t…do you,’ she replied.
‘I was thinking about this and that, this being Clare Cavendish, and that being Clare Cavendish too.’
‘Of course I’d come. I would have gone to her if she had been calling from the dark side of the moon.’ [Amen!]
In context, each of these passages hits the mark! Marlowe smokes too much, drinks too much, pays too little attention to money, and hangs on like a bulldog. It just does not add up, so he keeps going until it does, add up.
The ride includes a coshing or two, a pistol whipping, rape, torture, four murders, and a suicide. Though most of the mayhem occurs off camera, Midsomer’s got nothing on this body count.
The femme fatale is very femme and very fatale, spy beautiful, as Chandler wrote of another of her kind. But also, at times, blushing and shy. Marlowe has a hard time squaring that circle. At the end, so does the reader.
Her mother steals the show at one point, she a self-made woman in the perfume business and mother of this Aphrodite is not at all what Marlowe expected when summoned. No airs, no graces, no manners, and no nonsense!
Though Marlowe is unaccountably slow witted about finding the missing man’s sister. In fact she finds him. He asked doormen, gardeners, and drivers about the missing man but not the sister. Go figure. Maybe it is a ploy; play hard to get she’ll come to you.
The gimlet was a give away to the cognoscenti.
Benjamin Black (John Banville)
Not at all sure why anything would be called Liberace in 1947. The man took that name in 1950 and was by no means well known at the time. The casual reference to a Rolex watch jarred in 1947, long before it became a status symbol for the idle rich. Marlowe is surprisingly incurious about the femme fatale’s brother. Ditto a reference to Air Canada flying direct LA to Toronto, Wikipedia says Trans-Canada Airlines took the name Air Canada only in 1965. That part was easy to check. More than 2,000 miles for a 1947 aircraft. OK the date is not specified.
By the way that title has been used before with a different meaning.
