READING A BOOK THAT CAN’T POSSIBLY LIVE UP TO EXPECTATION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Blast from the past.

…standing in the shadow of the Stevenson house, I hadn’t read Weir of Hermiston. The book has an awesome reputation. From the man who gave us Treasure Island, came this – his greatest novel. He dropped dead after writing chapter nine.
   How can that be his greatest book? It’s unfinished. Hell, with nine chapters – it’s barely started. I refused to read it until recently. When I did, I had to agree with the view that it was his most accomplished work. I was saddened that he didn’t live to write the best jail-break scene in literature. All in the name of character, and in the service of the story.

Have I altered my view? Here is a book. It is the author’s finest work. An unfinished tale. There are enough notes from posterity to indicate how the book would’ve gone. How can such a non-book be the greatest effort from the author’s output?
   No, I haven’t altered my view. That is still his finest tale.
   I began thinking about other stories.
   No. I am always thinking about stories. Science fiction stories, for example. Stories in which crowds of people go into supermarkets to purchase food. Well, tales like that seem like science fiction, now, but one day those ideas will shift from fiction to fact.
   Robert B. Parker took a fragment of a Raymond Chandler story and bolted his own tale onto proceedings. The original proceedings were rather slim. If you are presented with the first few chapters of a mystery story, how much of the mystery is bolted on to the scene-setting?
   Chandler reached every writer’s ultimate deadline and died. He left behind a few pages of a story that’s out there under his label, with a big old Robert B. Parker rubber stamp across it. Poodle Springs was never going to be a proper Raymond Chandler detective story featuring Philip Marlowe.

It couldn’t possibly live up to the expectation. I’d never heard of Robert B. Parker, so I’d never read Robert B. Parker. Could he approach that world of Chandler’s with anything like a decent level of similarity?

*

I don’t mean a photocopy of Chandler’s style. Or a smudged photocopy of Chandler’s world-view. If you are looking for the continuation of a series based on a deceased author’s scribbled/typewritten notes, I think you are looking for an impressionist watercolour painting. At best. Yes, at very best. Not a digital scan.
   A crisp photocopy of a writer’s work comes across as dry and airless in tone. Use better toner. But who is Philip Marlowe, and where does he begin and end? There are many false starts and finishes to the character.
   Chandler created his detective with one eye on Arthurian literature. You don’t have to look far to see that. One of the books is called The Lady in the Lake, after all. Marlowe started off as characters in short stories. Detectives with different names.

When it came time to write full novels, Chandler strip-mined his short stories and stitched them together into books. Three books in, Chandler wrote a novel that didn’t depend on previously-published tales.
   So…
   Detective Philip Marlowe had a few false starts before he started. At the other end of the line, he had a few false trails leading to the end. You are better off reading the novels before tackling the short stories.

The books open with The Big Sleep and end with The Long Good-Bye. We must gloss over Playback, which came out after The Long Good-Bye. Philip Marlowe rises fully-formed from the sea in The Big Sleep and he walks off into the sunset, or along Sunset, in The Long Good-Bye. That’s all you need to know.
   Rather, it’s all we need concern ourselves with. No short story talk, and nothing about the fiction after a very lengthy farewell.
   The Big Sleep is a great opener for Chandler’s detective, and The Long Good-Bye is the ideal finish. Playback is from an unfilmed script dating to a decade before, and sits – quite rightly – off to the side when you are reading it.

Chandler’s first novel leads to more stitching of short stories and further adventures for the weary detective character of Marlowe in the second book. And The Long Good-Bye closes the series with its hyphenated title. Chandler was a writer who hyphenated to-morrow, and I suspect the title layout was at his snippy insistence.
   After The Long Good-Bye, does Playback live up to expectation? Not really. Playback is the diving board from which Poodle Springs springs. There’s even less chance of Poodle Springs living up to expectation, given that jumping-off point.
   I read the springy book anyway.
   Why? I wanted to see where Raymond Chandler ended and where Robert B. Parker began. But I am not writing this post to talk about Raymond Chandler. I am here to rake over the idea of reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation.
   An author scribbles away. The author dies. Another book is torn from the deceased scribe’s iron fingers. The death-grip loosens, and a publishing company makes a little cash. Was that a crime? The court of public opinion determines the verdict.
   Suppose there’s another criminal act? The author, in the library, with the fountain pen. What happens when an author writes a story in a series and…that story couldn’t possibly live up to expectation?
   The reader has to read this book. It is part of the series. That is the law. Expectation be damned.
   Sir John Mortimer’s comedic/dramatic creation of a lawyer in search of justice, Rumpole of the Bailey, provides an example of reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation. Everyone in Rumpole’s life is long-suffering. Especially Rumpole himself.
   He moves over the hallowed ground of the Old Bailey, and attempts to gain a not guilty verdict on behalf of an entire family of long-suffering villains. Insufferable long-suffering judges settle like dust into long-suffering courts and put up with Rumpole’s caustic long-suffered comments.
   Rumpole never enters a plea of guilty. (Well, that’s not strictly true.) And Rumpole always appears for the defence – never for the prosecution. (Well, that’s not strictly true, either.) As sure as night follows day, the Rumpole stories hand us many constants in the Old Bailey Hack’s life.
   He drinks cheap wine charitably referred to as plonk. Uncharitably, in unveiled references, the wine is akin to sewage. Rumpole quotes a lot. He bluffs, he blusters, and he takes to court as others take to the stage.
   Rumpole’s long-suffering wife Hilda is referred to in long-suffered style as She Who Must Be Obeyed, a descriptor only half-jokingly lifted from H. Rider Haggard. Mortimer gives us Rumpole’s world and gives us that world repeatedly. Familiarity breeds contempt of court, and there’s much fun in establishing the familiar only to pull the rug from under it.
   There’s one familiar item in Rumpole’s bag of tricks that never went anywhere. This was the story of an early case, The Penge Bungalow Murders. Often referenced and used as an in-joke, the Penge case offered little to go on beyond the title.
   Rumpole was a young legal beagle, and concluded the case alone and without a leader. He won a spectacular success. After many stories, and after the long-running television series ended, the author went to the library with the fountain pen, intent on committing a crime.
   The crime of giving us a book about The Penge Bungalow Murders. This is the literary felony of potentially killing your own franchise. The disaster of writing a prequel at odds with everything that followed on.

Scene. The time is now. Whenever now is. Rumpole raises the topic of The Penge Bungalow Murders one more time. But this time, Rumpole tells the tale. It is the story of a young lawyer who is thrown in at the deep end of a murder case when his boss drops out of proceedings.
   And, given the setting, it is a murder case with incredibly high stakes. The death penalty is still in place. What do we know, as readers? Rumpole can’t start the story in charge of the legal brief. But he must take over. And he is going to win. Where is the suspense, then? What is the point of this tale, except, perhaps, to give us a view of Young Rumpole in action?
   The added complication is that Rumpole meets Hilda in this story. Yes, we know how that ends. He must marry She Who Must Be Obeyed. This isn’t wildly speculative internet fiction or an alternative comic book universe, after all.
   Basic story building blocks are already carved into the landscape of the past and do not have to be shunted in place. Rather, they need merely be unveiled with a degree of ceremony. A degree of certainty.
   So why the hell write this? Why the hell read it?
   For the inevitable journey around familiar landmarks. The hype around the case counts against it. This story cannot live up to expectation. There is a sense of inevitability about the plotting. We need a murder. And a victim. The suspect. A sense of injustice. High stakes. And the wooing of Hilda. Or is it the wooing of Rumpole by Hilda? You decide.
   Yes, this is a prequel. It is a very bad place to start reading about Horace Rumpole. The effect, the joke, only works after repeated exposure to mentions of the case in all the other stories. You shouldn’t read The Long Good-Bye first if you want to hear about Philip Marlowe, private detective/knight-at-arms.
   How heavily does continuity feature in a story of this type? Long-delayed prequel. A book people frothed to read, yet were afraid the writer would publish. Continuity in Mortimer’s stories wasn’t a very strong point to begin with.
   Characters are frozen in amber in the Rumpole tales. They are born, they live, and they keep on going as the years pass by. With stories set now, now is a very loose term. Rumpole’s date of birth is a matter for major miscalculation. When did he buy his first legally-required white wig? Did he marry Hilda during the Second World War or after? When did the murders occur in that bungalow in Penge? Is Rumpole a vampire, given that he seems to be there in the same offices and same courts, decade in, decade out?
   There’s another character who qualifies for this semi-eternal blurriness over the timeline, and that’s John le Carré’s Cold War operator, George Smiley. We’ll return to him in short order.
   Details flutter out of Mortimer’s legal stories, giving glimpses of those murders in the bungalow and Rumpole’s involvement in the trial. When Mortimer finally hands us a murder case Rumpole HAS TO SOLVE, and solve ALONE, can the story possibly live up to the expectation?
   Rumpole’s world itself is a world packed with inconsistencies, told over many years, and would tax all but a godly editor when trying to keep the timeline straight. It is no surprise that the story about the Penge murders is also dogged by inconsistencies.
   We gloss over that. It’s something we gloss over when reading the regular stories about an eternal Old Bailey Hack.
   Reading a book that can’t possibly live up to expectation is a pursuit with very few avenues of escape. Let’s wander the avenues.
   The story can’t live up to expectation, can it? So we agree that you know this, going in. You are reading just to confirm this. In the case of Robert B. Parker, he was no Raymond Chandler and you knew that. Parker’s friends continued his stories after he died. The death-grip loosens, and a publishing company makes a little cash.
   Alternatively, down another avenue, the story goes beyond expectation. Exceeding your wildest dreams, you praise the story for not being internet fan-fiction. Fan-fic’s always bad, coming from the original writer. We should not dwell on that point.
   How was the story, then? Which avenue did the author take?
   I always hoped we’d see a tale about the murders in that bungalow down in exotic Penge. (A hasty scan of the interwebs tells me people are dedicated to the view that Penge is where planning decisions go to die.)
   Batting the continuity glitches aside, I thought the story lived up to its impossible expectation and went a little further. Above all else, it’s an atmospheric piece about a familiar character’s younger days. It works on its own terms, and that’s all we need ask of a story. My opinion that the book was great fun…is irrelevant, naturally.
   We could ask the story for coffee and a triple chocolate muffin, but that’s an expectation too far.
   I once considered the Stevenson story a tale too far for me. What was the point of reading nine chapters? I was surprised by the enjoyment I gained from an unfinished story.
   In the case of the Chandler piece, that’s four chapters of Raymond Chandler and the rest is very clearly Robert B. Parker. I’d looked at an unfinished tale by Stevenson and another one barely even started by Chandler. Big differences there.
   With Mortimer, I was given the story oft-times mentioned yet never seen. Finally, the author ran the Questing Beast to its thorny lair. Here you had the original author completing a story and handing it in. The expectation being that he wouldn’t mess it up.
   He didn’t mess it up. There’s great enjoyment in hearing of Rumpole’s significant case, and even greater fun in then reading it.
   At this point, I should return to le Carré. With A Legacy of Spies, le Carré was an author still alive, handing in his homework. Not a prequel. And not a sequel. Awkwardly…both. A return to an earlier time, with a story that filled in the blanks.
   Expectation was high.
   For reasons of the plot, I can’t really discuss the plot.
   Our tale starts with Call for the Dead. It continues later in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I always wondered about a character in the series. There was an obvious story gap with no obvious explanation.
   We move on through le Carré’s novels to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There’s a major bit of plotting here that sets you thinking about previous books in the series. An obvious story gap with no obvious explanation.
   Years later, the author turns in his not-prequel, filling in those two obvious gaps with explanations that more or less hold up. You’d think I’d be delighted to have two great puzzle pieces handed to me by the original scribe…
   I was two pieces shy of the whole jigsaw, after all.
   And yet…
   The author’s one crime was to set the story now, whenever now is. George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A Legacy of Spies came out, you could point to assorted Smiley stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up. Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
   This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29 years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped crusader in The Dark Knight Returns, for example.
   Inconsistencies in A Legacy of Spies are overlooked. The one thing that let it down for me was the updated setting. If le Carré could’ve done anything to remove the absurdity of an elderly character getting ready to mix it up in a raging fistfight, he should have set the story in 1985 instead of the 2016-ish territory we are saddled with.
   No, not Smiley himself. Though Smiley appears in the story, I can’t quite take in the notion that he’d still be living by his wits and on his memory at the age of post-100. A Legacy of Spies was a prequel and a sequel rolled into one. And it almost worked. But the millstone around its neck was the improbable age of several characters in the early 2000s. Characters who belong, firmly entrenched, in the late 1900s.
   This is something Philip Marlowe suffers from. We’d like to think of Marlowe stuck in the late 1930s, leading up to the Second World War. Yet there he is, still walking those mean streets in the early 1950s. Rumpole swerved retirement age every time he took up later cases. I suspect he swerved retirement in more than a few of the earlier ones.
   Stevenson’s story exceeded my expectation by leaps and bounds.
   Robert B. Parker’s book is the only Robert B. Parker book on my shelves. I resisted the non-temptation to read his unnecessary sequel to The Big Sleep.
   Mortimer’s easy target, finally giving us the big case, was no easy target after all, and more than lived up to the expectation.
   And le Carré almost came away with a classic, explaining behind-the-scenes scenes that lay behind the scenes of other scenes. To set the story in 1985 or 1989 would have guaranteed classic status. Almost there, but not quite. Oh, I liked the jigsaw pieces le Carré finally handed out. Begrudgingly, he gave us those.
   Expectation is inevitable. Inevitably, set expectation aside and just read the damned stories. See what you think, yourself. If you go further than that, you go further by writing as well as reading.

My copy of A Legacy of Spies has defected to the other side…of a bookshelf, somewhere in the Berlin area. I could engage in a spy hunt to photograph the suspect. Or just let an old Cold Warrior enjoy retirement…