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 leCarré’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 leCarré.
With A Legacy of Spies, leCarré 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 leCarré’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 leCarré 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 leCarré 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 leCarré 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…
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