TAILING RAYMOND CHANDLER (2010) by Brian
Thomas Olson
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
Los Angeles private detective
John Lash is hired by Violet Merill to recover a screenplay that is missing
from the major motion picture studio Ultramount, a screenplay that may have
been pilfered by an employee who was working on it when it disappeared. The employee?
Raymond Chandler.
Lash recognizes the name,
says he’s aware Chandler has written two books, and that he’s read some of the
author’s stories in Black Hand Mystery
Magazine. (Why Brian Thomas Olson didn’t use the actual name, Black Mask, is beyond me.) Violet Merill
points out that Chandler’s a heavy drinker, “is in some financial difficulty,”
and that he at one time had an affair with an Ultramount secretary.
Lash isn’t on the case long
before he realizes Violet Merill isn’t who and what she claims to be, or before
another woman named Violet is murdered. When a second murder occurs, the victim
being a former cop turned private detective who was heavily involved in a probe
of corruption in the city government, Lash is the prime suspect. Lash must also
contend with Josiah Curmon, an easily-manipulated city commissioner, and the powerful
local gangster, Delvin Beasley, while dodging the police, trying to determine
what’s so important about the missing screenplay, nailing the real killer, and
saving the lives of Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy.
How do I criticize thee? Oh,
let me count the ways! Reluctantly, I should add, because I dislike writing
negative reviews. Unfortunately, Tailing
Raymond Chandler, despite being decently written, for the most part, and
offering an intriguing story even if it does contain its share of clichéd private eye story tropes, teems
with problems.
The book, as far as I can
tell, is only available in a Kindle edition. The first problem concerns the
formatting. The sample on Amazon’s website contains slightly indented paragraphs. They do not appear as such on my
Kindle; there’s no indentation at all. I have no explanation as to why this is.
The other problems include
punctuation, capitalization, and usage errors; misspellings; and clumsy,
sometimes ungrammatical sentences. It’s no big spoiler to reveal that Violet
Merill’s real name is Joey Wareng—the reader learns that fairly early. But long
before that revelation, there are a couple of passages calling her Joey Merill when Violet is the intended name. These and some other mistakes suggest
that the author failed to catch and correct them during the process of revising
his final draft. He really needs a good proofreader.
He also needs to do his
homework if he’s going to write about some real people from an older era
because the novel’s biggest problems are anachronistic. A squib on the book’s
Amazon page says the time of the story is 1939 when it’s actually 1938. I know
this because the novel mentions that actress Thelma Todd died three years
earlier. She died in 1935. What bearing does this have on the story? When
Violet Merill first mentions Raymond Chandler to John Lash, Lash says that
Chandler has written two books. The fact is, Chandler’s first two novels, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, were published in 1939 and 1940, respectively.
Moreover, he went to work for Paramount Pictures as a screenwriter in 1943. In
1938, he was only writing for the
pulps.
There’s also a very oblique
reference to the James Cagney film White
Heat, which didn’t come out until 1949. A film studio called American
International is mentioned. I suspect Brian Thomas Olson thought he was making
up a fictitious name, but in fact there was an actual American International
Pictures. It began in 1954.
The author describes Chandler
as “in his late 40s, just under six feet in height, medium build, slightly
balding, wearing round tortoise-shell eyeglasses and smoking a pipe.” I’ve
never seen a photo of Chandler that indicates he was balding.
The author has Chandler say
he was once in Naval Intelligence. I’ve never read anything that substantiates
that claim. When World War I broke out—I’m quoting the curriculum vitae from Raymond
Chandler Speaking, edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine Sorley Walker
(Houghton Mifflin, 1962)—Chandler “Enlisted with the Canadian Gordon
Highlanders. Served in France with the First Division of the Canadian
Expeditionary Force. In 1918 joined the Royal Flying Corps (R.A.F.).
Demobilised [sic] in England in 1919.”
A brief biographical note at
the book’s end says of Olson and his wife: “Both are avid Raymond Chandler
fans.” That being the case, you’d think Mr. Olson would present his subject
more accurately.
© 2015,
2020 Barry Ergang
Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has
appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is
available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His
website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.
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