This week for Friday’s
Forgotten Books it is Barry’s turn front and center. The complete list of books
is over on Patti Abbott’s blog at http://pattinase.blogspot.com/
While you are there, check out what is going on with Pulp Ink 2 and other things of note.
THE MARBLE ORCHARD (1996) by William F. Nolan
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
Best known as the author of the science fiction novel Logan’s Run and the screenplay for the
film adaptation of same, William F. Nolan is a versatile writer who has worked
in several fiction genres and who has written a number of non-fiction works as
well. In 1985 he wrote The Black Mask
Boys, a book highlighting the stories of eight important writers who helped
make Black Mask the most renowned detective
pulp magazine of them all. Each story was prefaced with a biographical piece
about its author. Nine years later he published The Black Mask Murders, the first novel in a trilogy that stars
“The Black Mask Boys”: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley
Gardner. All three appear in every book, but each is narrated in the
first-person by a different writer: The
Black Mask Murders by Hammett, Sharks
Never Sleep by Gardner, and The
Marble Orchard, under consideration here, by Chandler.
The year is 1936, and Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy
are living in the Los Angeles
area. Chandler
continues to learn and hone his writing craft by turning out stories for Black Mask, the magazine that has also been
a home to stories by his friends Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner.
When Chandler
answers a phone call from a homicide lieutenant requesting that Cissy come to
the morgue to identify a body, he asks who the dead man is and learns it’s
Julian Pascal, Cissy’s former husband. His body was found in a Chinese
cemetery, and his death appears to have been a ritual suicide. A stunned Chandler tells the
detective that he’ll come to the
morgue, that he and Julian were friends. Once he confirms the dead man’s
identity, Chandler
dreads having to tell Cissy. When he breaks the news to her, she vehemently
insists that Julian would never kill himself and urges Chandler to look into the matter to find out
what really happened.
A mysterious woman in a white limousine appears at Julian’s
funeral, a woman later identified as Carmilla Blastok, a now-retired actress
whose claim to fame is a series of films that began with The Blood Countess, in which she portrayed a vampire, “a kind of
female Lugosi,” as Hammett describes her. She retired after David DuPlaine, the
director of all her hit films, was shot to death, ostensibly by a burglar he caught
in the act of robbing his house. When Chandler
meets with her, he learns she barely knew Julian Pascal, though the latter composed
the scores for a couple of her films. She attended his funeral, she tells him,
because she hoped to see her much younger sister Elina there. She suspects that
Elina once had an inappropriate relationship with Julian.
Elina, who had had a brief acting career herself, has been
estranged from Carmilla for three years, having taken up with an abusive former
stage actor named Merv Enright. Carmilla begs Chandler to find her sister, just so she can
know if the girl is alive and well. When he reminds her that he’s a writer, not
a detective, she offers to pay him a thousand dollars, money he can sorely use.
Thinking that Elina might be able to enlighten him about Julian and thereby
enable him to definitively resolve the question of Julian’s death, he
accepts.
And so, enlisting when necessary the assistance of his
friends Hammett and Gardner, Chandler’s adventure at “playing detective”
begins, plunging him into some situations more appropriate to his fictional
sleuths than to a middle-aged former oil company executive turned pulp writer.
One of those situations is reminiscent of a similar one in his novel Farewell, My Lovely, as William F. Nolan
no doubt playfully intended readers to believe Chandler used his “real life”
experience as the basis for Philip Marlowe’s fictional one several years later.
As entertaining a whodunit as The Marble Orchard is, the detective-story portion feels like one
of novelette length, the rest a lot of filler. Thus the reader is given scenes
involving real-life personalities including William Randolph Hearst, Orson
Welles, and Shirley Temple, among others—scenes that do nothing to advance the
plot but which serve to fix the story in a particular place and era. The reader
is given historical information about a number of locales within the greater Los Angeles area. And there
is a secondary story thread involving an African-American man and woman that is
clearly meant to depict the racial attitudes of the period but which is wholly
irrelevant to the principal plotline. Fortunately, Nolan is a skillful writer
with a smart sense of pace, so the filler is equally entertaining and doesn’t disrupt
the flow.
Since I first discovered him when I was in my early teens,
Raymond Chandler has always been one of my literary heroes. (The Long Goodbye is my all-time-favorite
novel.) So enamored of his style was I that, back then, when writing a story,
I’d often ask myself, “How would Chandler
handle this scene, or this section of narrative, or this exchange of dialogue?”
Ultimately I realized that developing my own style and voice, for better or
worse, was preferable to imitating another’s. Playing Robert Louis Stevenson’s
“sedulous ape” will only get you so far; eventually you have to (and should
want to) come into your own. To truly write like someone else requires one to be someone else.
Chandler
has had plenty of imitators. I personally think his style was among the most
influential of the 20th Century and
might very well still be one. Whether they intended
to imitate him some of those writers might dispute, but the influence is indisputably
there. Three who carried it off well were Howard Browne writing as John Evans (incidentally
the name of one of Chandler’s
pre-Marlowe pulp-magazine detectives) in his Paul Pine mysteries; Roy Huggins
in The Double Take; and Keith Laumer
in his purposed homage, Deadfall.
As a former editor of a couple of mystery magazines, one of
my biggest pet peeves was the story submission that deliberately tried to
imitate Chandler’s—or
anyone else’s—distinctive style. Unless the author was writing an obvious spoof
or one-time tribute, he or she was virtually guaranteed a rejection. I wanted to
publish stories in the authors’ own unique styles.
To his credit—and he touches on the matter in an afterword—Nolan,
save for maybe three similes, does not write like Chandler writing a Philip Marlowe novel.
That’s because Nolan is not writing a Marlowe novel; he’s writing what is
intended as a report from Raymond Chandler about events in which he personally
played a role.
All things considered, then, The Marble Orchard is a good, if unexceptional, detective story embedded
in a lot of entertaining and informative filler, and populated with a variety
of colorful characters.
*****
Postscript: In
real life, Chandler
and Hammett met exactly once, at a dinner for Black Mask writers. In his biography of Chandler, Tom Hiney writes that Gardner and Chandler were friends,
but outside of some correspondence they exchanged, I’ve never read anything
that indicates they actually spent time in each other’s presence.
Barry Ergang © 2012
The Marble Orchard is one of the many books from his personal
collection Barry Ergang has for sale at http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/.
He’ll contribute 20% of the price of the books to our
fund, so please have a look at his lists. Some of his fiction is
available at Smashwords
and Amazon.com, and Amazon also has
available a couple of his poetry collections.
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