The way somebody barges in on a private eye and offers him a job - find my missing girl Velma, hold my hand while I pay off these blackmailers - somebody contacted Robert B. Parker and threw a case his way.
The client was Ed Victor, an American agent living in London, where he represents the Raymond Chandler estate. He wanted to know if Parker, the Boston-based writer of 17 Spenser mysteries, would take four extant chapters of a manuscript Chandler was working on before his death and wrap them up, figure out where the famed writer would have taken it.It was called "The Poodle Springs Story," and it had Chandler's hardboiled P.I., Philip Marlowe, hitched to a "woman with a lot of money who wants to live a rather smart expensive life." In a letter to his English agent, Helga Greene, Chandler added that the point of the new book was that "there would be a struggle of personalities and ideas of life which would make a good sub-plot."
Not much to go on: 5,000 words set in the arid desert retreat of Palm Springs - which Chandler dubbed Poodle Springs, "because every third elegant creature you see has at least one poodle" - with Marlowe married to the beautiful Linda Loring (whom he had met in "The Long Goodbye"), and insisting that he keep an office and his investigator's license.
Parker took the assignment. The result, "Poodle Springs," sporting a purply pulp-style cover, has been comfortably lodged on the bestseller lists. With 200,000 copies already in print, "Poodle Springs" is being offered by three separate book clubs, a paperback deal has been signed with Berkley Books and Universal Pictures has purchased the screen rights.
And if they make the film - "and they'll probably make it because they expended a great deal of money," notes Parker - the big, ruddy-faced writer stands to make a bundle. "I believe I get a piece of the gross if they make the film," he says. "That's an excellent deal."
Can he say how much money Universal paid out for the rights?
"I can, but I won't," he says with a grin. "Just say I'm doing OK."
After 17 Spenser books - and a three-year ABC-TV series (now in syndication) based on his Spenser characters - that's a foregone conclusion, no?
"Oh yeah. I'm doing pretty good to tell you the truth."
Parker, 57, turns out a Spenser mystery every year (the next, "Stardust," is due in the spring), and the last few - "Taming a Seahorse," "Pale Kings and Princes," "Crimson Joy," "Playmates" - have all landed on the bestseller lists. Even if the "Poodle Springs" deal never happened, he'd be doing "pretty good." Clearly, the awesome task of completing a work by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century was not motivated merely by dollar signs.
"Victor and the estate chose me to do it because they felt I was the closest living writer that they could think of to Chandler," Parker says. "I was an appropriate choice for them, they felt, and I think that's probably true.
"I was pleased and excited at the prospect. I'd grown up wishing I could be Philip Marlowe. I had always admired Chandler greatly, I'd read all his books, and I had done a doctoral dissertation in which he was one of the figures I had studied."
The dissertation (for Boston University) was on the American hero. "Don't ask me the title. It was one of those dissertation titles, about three sentences long. Anyway, it was the study of the American hero. The last three chapters dealt with how he was expressed in the novels of Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald.
"So, I was flattered when they came along and asked me to do `Poodle Springs,' and not Tom Clancy or somebody."
Parker was aware from the outset that not everyone would be keen on the idea of exhuming what was probably just a working draft (he readily concedes the four chapters are not Chandler at his finest) and completing it.
"The vulture picking at the bones of the dead hero. . . . Why can't Chandler be left in peace. . . ? Hyenas circling the carcass. . . . I knew it was inevitable going in."
And he was right. Although "Poodle Springs" has garnered its fair share of positive reviews, there have been a number of passionate detractors, too. Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor of "Chandler Before Marlowe" and author of "Raymond Chandler, a Checklist," sized it up when he told the Washington Post, "After four or five pages of the non-Chandler material, among the words that came to mind were atrocity, desecration. And then I turned unpleasant."
Parker's response?
He moistens his lips and lets fly with a furious raspberry.
"I don't feel that I'm doing anything unseemly," he says. "Someone asked me if I died and left an unfinished novel, would I like this done to me, and I said, `Yeah, if the guy was good. If `Dutch' (Elmore) Leonard were to do it, I'd be perfectly happy."
And Parker, clearly, thinks it's better. "I think the book is so good that if you like this book, you might like another Chandler."