It's probably been a long time since you've read a Philip Marlowe private investigator (PI) novel by Raymond Chandler. If you ever have. The books are "of a time" -- classic for detective fiction, and redolent of California Anglo culture in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Silver Screen meant so much.
So why would you read one now, if you're not into the classics?
Simple: Glasgow mystery queen Denise Mina wrote this one, in sync with Raymond Chandler Ltd. And it's a lively, enjoyable read, made "modern" with assertive women whose beauty and intelligence operate in tandem, in that famous California sunshine.
First, though, here's the original voice of Chandler at the opening of The Big Sleep:
It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
Now here's Denise Mina, doing Chandler/Marlowe:
I was in my office, feet up, making use of a bottle of mood-straightener I kept in the desk. A mid-September heatwave had descended on the city. Brittle heat rolled down from parched hills, lifting thin dust from roads and sidewalks, suspending it in the rising air and turning the sky yellow. ... I don't usually drink in the office at ten thirty in the morning but I had a bad taste to wash away.
Nice, right?
Here's a quick sketch of THE SECOND MURDERER by Denise Mina: Marlowe, narrating in his classic first-person style, immediately hates his new client, but the missing young woman he's supposed to find seems to be in a lot of trouble, and some of his old friends think she deserves a hand. Of course he can't resist a pretty young woman in trouble. He locates her soon, but sorting out her situation turns out to be way, way over his head. At least four strong women get involved; they can't really make it all better either, and Mina adds a bitter ending that fits the genre very well.
I thought I'd go nuts in the first quarter of the book, because the editors clearly have no idea of American spellings, alas ... it's very distracting to have a California PI talking in British spellings! The the plot took over and I enjoyed the rest of the book. I won't want a second reading, but the first one turned out fine. The main thing is, despite her Scottish writing accent, Mina knows how to turn a good story. (In fact, the last quarter of the book sounded more like Mina than Chandler, but I'm not complaining.) And she definitely did her research -- it's California all the way.
Also on my reading table for the past few weeks has been JOSEPH SEAVEY HALL (1818-1899), Pioneer of Mountain Tourism, by Annie Gibavic. This 227-page New Hampshire mountains history (Bondcliff Books) is authentic in ways that Mina's Chandler novel can't match—Gibavic is both a regional historian and a descendant of Hall, and worked from a trove of correspondence and background material to write the life of this mountain guide, including his adventures during the Civil War, silver mining in Nevada, assisting family in rough-country Michigan, and settling for his final years in Vermont.
Joseph Seavey Hall began his working life in the White Mountains when it was wilderness, and cut roads and built shelters, becoming the "engineer" of tourist routes on Mount Washington. Guiding and rescue alternated in his life after that, because the region took quite a toll on those on foot, especially in winter. Gibavic quotes passages from the death of Lizzie Bourne and, even more powerfully, from Hall's noted rescue of Dr. B. L. Ball on the mountain:
We dispatched a man with a red flag to a point that could be seen from the Glen House. Mr. Thompson was so watch for a signal with his telescope in case we found him. He caught the signal. I throwed my right arm around the Man's body with his left arm over my shoulder and with another man holding to the other side we hastened with our living burden in the direction of the Bridle Road. He had no use of his limbs and no other than the very strongest of men could have moved him over the rough Mountain.
The trove of original material that Gibavic amassed is stunning, and Hall's story is well worth the read. Like Mina, but with less fanfare, Gibavic crafts voices from the past in order to quilt her excerpted material together. As she explains in her author note at the end, "The words of Alice and Kitty are for the most part fictional, to lend continuity to the story." Gibavic's personal heritage of family lore and affection are also significant in this quilting.
For some readers, the improvised fictional voices will distract, since the language in them is not as closely matched to the originals as Mina managed for Chandler. Yet even Mina showed her own narrative style eventually, so we can hardly fault Gibavic for a dose of the same. And in fact, her connection passages do exactly what she'd planned: They offer a more contemporary slant on what Hall's life engaged and how startling and impressive the achievements of this undereducated but ambitious man grew to be.
I recommend both books—but for very separate explorations. If you try both of them, let me know what parallels you see.
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