Category Archives: 21st century literature

21st century literature, Book review, Carlos Ruix Zafon, literature in translation, The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruix Zafon, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves

This is one of the novels included in the Eton headmaster’s list I wrote about earlier this month.

Let’s start with the nonsensical title, which sets the tone for the rest of the novel. The wind does not have a shadow. Perhaps I am being overly literal, or perhaps that is the point – the title being a euphemism for something that doesn’t exist. The title is also the name of the novel that is the subject matter of the story, a novel that is elusive and hard to pin down, like its author. So the title is, if I am being kind, an ironic, tongue in cheek, self-referential joke.

 

The same summary could be applied to the rest of the novel. It is written in high gothic style, reminiscent of the early 19thcentury gothic, grand guiginol novel. When one of the characters tells one of the many tales within a tale that make up this novel, another character responses that “It had all the makings of a lurid melodrama. “(239). When I read that I felt like responding as another character did when yet another diversionary tale is being spun ““The abridged version…for goodness sake!” (253). There are scenes set in crypts, with mysterious, ghostly apparitions, sinister, spectral figures lurking in the gloom, and so on. (See chapter 34 for the height of this style). The principal plot follows a young man who comes across a novel (the eponymous Shadow of the Wind) by a mysterious writer, Julian Carax. The young man tries to track Carax down, following various clues, and passes through a maze of clues until finally, at the novel’s climax, Carax’s true identify is revealed.

 

It’s hard to take this melodrama seriously. It seems more in European taste (for example, The Name of the Rose” which is an obvious influence) but is very old-fashioned. The tendency for characters to monologue about their exotic past reminded me at points of the un-improvable scene in Austin Powers, where Dr Evil reminisces about his childhood.

 

“The details of my life are quite inconsequential… very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum… it’s breath-taking- I highly suggest you try it.”

 

Compare this with:

 

“This dream was the first of many and they began with that mysterious fever, which some blamed on the sting of a huge red scorpion that appeared in the house one day and was never seen again, and others on the evil designs of a mad nun who crept into houses at night to poison children, and who, years later, was to be garrotted reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards with her eyes popping out of their sockets, while a red cloud spread over the town, discharging a storm of dead cockroaches” (268)

 

If you like this sort of thing, then obviously this is the sort of thing you will like. But is it well done? Are the characters convincing? Is the narrative compelling? Is this suitable reading for a well-read 16 year-old Etonian?

 

Well not really, no. The text is repetitive and over-written. There is little to admire in the writing by way of style, although I appreciate that could be in part a question of translation. The plot is ridiculous and predictable, and characters behave as they do without apparent motivation or sense. Women are reduced to cyphers – there isn’t a well developed female character in the book, and those that do appear are all generic and passive. Why this appeared on the Etonian reading list is more of a mystery than that unwound in this novel.

 

Redeeming features? Well the background was interesting. Post-Civil War Spain, where the fascists remain in control and the Secret Police can still make people disappear, where everyone has lost a family member or friend, was realistically drawn. But that’s largely it. This novel has huge numbers of five star reviews on Amazon, so I am obviously missing something.

This edition, published for the 10th anniversary of the book’s original publication, contains at the end some “Book Club reading notes”. I doubt if the book was originally written for this market, but there is a childishness, a paradoxical lack of complexity in the characterisation and plot (which for all its detail and length is actually fairly straightforward; all is revealed in a very linear way with the minimum amount of effort from the investigators, and carefully laid out in well preserved diaries and notes when required) which makes this suitable book club material, as well as justifying its inclusion in the Eton “What every 16 year old boy should have read” list.

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21st century literature, Book review

Supplementary: A bit more about “A Spot of Bother”

The primary character in Mark Haddon’s “A Spot of Bother”, Douglas Hall, is 57. Much of the “humour” of the novel derives from his unhinged behaviour as he suffers from a nervous breakdown/depressive episode. I wrote yesterday about how this is in poor taste, as is the humour wrung from people’s shock horror reaction to a gay couple kissing. The novel is less than ten years old, but it had more of a 70’s sitcom feel to it in these passages. But what I wanted to write about in a bit more detail here is the portrayal of Douglas. Haddon tells us he is 57, but then writes him at least ten years older. He is retired, which of course is eminently possible at 57, but he has pretty much given up on life. He potters around, building a shed, watching videos and taking an interest in bird spotting. He finds the modern world confusing and challenging, and when he has sex with his wife it takes them both by surprise.

57 isn’t old.

Why does this matter? Because when the central character is unrealistic, hard to like but also hard to believe in, the whole book suffers. Without a convincing portrayal in this role the rest of the characters struggle. Some are better than others – the daughter Katie for example is well drawn, and the wife, Jean, with her badly kept secret affair was also believeable. But given the caricature that is Douglas and Jean’s son Jamie, I wasn’t convinced Haddon had ever met a gay man.

Of course, having written the above I then checked the Internet (does it age me that I still capitalise Internet?  Of course it does) expecting to find out that Haddon was gay, but it appears not. Interestingly I found some confirmation of my observations about reviewers – so for example the Sydney Morning Herald said “while the characterisation can’t be faulted, A Spot of Bother fails to fulfil its early promise. What initially shapes up as a disquietingly soft stab in the human heart turns obvious and formulaic. Haddon’s examination of the contours of love is forensic in its insight but a sentimental undertow proves too alluring to resist” and the Guardian said “it never tries to be much more than good jokes or funny situations….readers could be forgiven for wanting – and expecting – more.” Selectively quoting reviewers to support your position is cheating, and I rarely do it, but there was something about the half hearted quotes on the cover that led me to suspect my feelings were shared.

In his earlier career Haddon wrote exclusively for children. The migration from that to adult novels obviously isn’t easy, and some of the weaknesses of this novel could be seen as deriving from the habits of writing for children – the cheap laughs, the weakly drawn characters, the tendency towards slapstick. So perhaps rather than seeing this as a follow up novel to “A Curious Incident” it is better thought of as a transition novel from writing for kids to writing for adults?

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21st century literature, A Spot of Bother, Book review, Mark Haddon

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon

This was Haddon’s second novel, published in 2006 after his hugely successful “A Curious Incident”. I have reviewed his third novel, “The Red House” on this blog previously, and was optimistic that this would be equally readable. Largely it was – the very short chapters and frequent changes of narrative perspective meant the pages passed quickly, and I finished the near 500 pages in a couple of days. This would normally an indication that the novel was well written and enjoyable, but I finished this with a vague feeling that something wasn’t quite right. What could it be?

Well, to start with, there’s that awful title, a cheesy pun (the principal character has a spot which he thinks is cancerous, and which triggers a series depressive episode) reminiscent of a Norman Wisdom film or episode of Some Mothers (“Betty, I’m having a spot of bother”). The author avoids putting much effort into giving the characters a back story, which is sketched in very faintly, simply by making occasional reference to “that time the dog got run over in Rhyl” or “the time we crashed the mini in Copenhagen” (made up examples, but you get the idea). I flicked through the book at random and picked out these examples (not made up this time) and realised that Haddon uses this technique a lot more than I thought:
“several years ago when he had fallen from a stepladder, broken his elbow on the rockery, and passed out, a sensation which he remembered as being not unpleasant (a view from the Tamar bridge in Plymouth had featured prominently for some reason)” (page 1
“He had not felt like this since John Zinewski’s Fireball had capsized several years ago and he had found himself trapped underwater with his ankle knotted in a loop of rope.” (2)
“Betty’s brother, the one who died in that horrible factory accident, had made a hat out of a napkin.” (52)
“”Got pulled over by police on the M5 once…wingwalking on a Volvo roofrack”” (66)
“Coming home from university… spilling that paint over the cat, losing her passport in Malta.” (233)
And so relentlessly on. All families have disaster stories, enhanced over time, which cumulatively build the family history. They are important. But a novelist needs surely to make more of them than this. At first I thought we would get round to visiting these incidents and finding in them the key to the principal characters various neuroses – there has to be a reason why a bit of eczema causes George to have a full-blown nervous breakdown – but it never happens. I don’t mind doing a bit of work to fill in gaps left by an author, but this was too much – the characters were cut-outs who behaved as they did for no apparent reason, take it or leave it.
There is an attempt at farce here, reminiscent of Tom Sharpe. People mix anti-depressants and alcohol with inevitable results, dog poo is trodden in, a toddler’s toy is tripped over, a gay couple kiss and outrage the religious aunt and uncle, and so on. The wedding, which is the drawn-out climax of the novel ends in a fight, sex, and tears, as we always knew it would.
Being charitable, I prefer to think of this novel as a dry run for the much more controlled “Red House”.
PS: like most contemporary novels the cover and back cover are covered in quotes from reviewers. You get the sense that my luke-warm response was shared – the Guardian described the book as “readable” and “brisk”, the Telegraph “entertaining” and the Sunday Times “crisp, light” (like a white wine?). Damned with faint praise.
 
 
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21st century literature, Book review, David Nicholls, Us

Book review: Us, by David Nicholls

David Nicholls’s previous two novels, “Starter for Ten” and “One Day” have both been made into moderately successful films, so I don’t think it is being overly cynical to conclude that the setting for this novel – a series of European capitals and art galleries – was at least in part influenced by the author’s anticipation of sealing another film deal. Once you open with that cynicism, it is hard to stop. But I think you should. OK, the chapters are all extremely short, designed I suspect for the attention deficient, but the principal character, Douglas, who is also our narrator, is not an endearing character. He is a bore, and a bit of a bully. He is inattentive towards his wife, and positively negligent of his 17 year old son. He knows he has traded up in marrying his artistic wife, and never overcomes that expectation that sooner or later she is going to realise it too.

And so it comes to pass, when shortly before their son leaves for university, and it is suggested, for good, his wife announces apropos of nothing, that she wants to leave him. In a desperate, if photogenic, attempt to save his marriage he takes her on the tour mentioned above, although for reasons hard to imagine he thinks it is a good idea to take their son as well. The tour goes badly from the off, and never recovers.

I thought I knew how this novel would end, long before it did, and I was wrong. Nicholls avoids the cliched happy ending, and quite possibly forfeits the film deal I cynically accused him of engineering earlier. (Although if it does translate to film then they will probably rewrite the ending.)

This is pretty undemanding stuff, not quite chick-lit (or whatever the male equivalent is) but not many steps up either. Nicholls writes quite slowly, so I won’t have to make the decision as to whether to bother with his next novel for a while yet, but if I had to make it today I’d look for something a bit more challenging.

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21st century literature, Book review, dystopian fiction, The Book of Dave, Will Self

The Book of Dave by Will Self

“The Book of Dave” has been on my “should get round to reading at some point” list for some time now, having read the blurb and been curious about where the author would take the idea. Having said that, the scenario of this novel is startlingly unoriginal. The world has suffered a catastrophe, and the small number of survivors have reverted to barbarism. They base their rituals on a surviving text, the Book of Dave, the demented ramblings of a London cabbie, who in the novel’s most contrived scene decides to have his ravings printed on  metals plates to ensure their survival. Of course he did. (“Red Dwarf” did this much better, the cat civilisation basing all their beliefs on Dave Lister’s half remembered daydreams.)
Self created a language for the survivors, Mokni, which is relatively easy to follow if you speak estuary English, and take the time to sound out the words. The lexicon at the back of this Penguin edition is also helpful, if you know it is there! I was going to write about how cleverly Self allows the reader to decode the specialist terms he uses – moto, opare, moped, etc – but I stumbled across these translations about 400 pages in, by which time I suspect many readers will have abandoned ship (or pedalo). Most of this new language derives from Dave’s experienced of driving a cab, so people are fares, the sun is a foglamp, full beam or otherwise, and so on.

Continue reading →

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21st century literature, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Miscellany

Comment: Shades of Grey

A guest blog today:

Now upon reading that title, I bet you thought of either the erotic books or the simply disturbing film. I bet none of you thought of anything else. And you know what? I hate those books – the film too I guess. They have left a mark not only on British culture, but on the minds of anyone who had the curiosity to follow the media’s hype over the damned thing.

Before you ask, no, I have not read them. I guess that may be bad given that I am writing an article criticising them, but the detailed content is not what I want to focus on. This book has a mountain-load of critics commenting on how the series is unrealistic and disrespectful in its representation of men, women, relationships and the key word “consent”; but that again is not my focus.

My repugnance towards the book is personal, mostly concerned with the title. Anything that now has “50”, “shades”, or “grey” related to it has a permanent association with this smut. For example, one of my favourite sayings, ‘Black and white and all between are all but shades of grey’ which I think is brilliant visual imagery to demonstrate how everyone is equal and should be treated with respect, is now ruined. If I were to ever again say this, it would be greeted with an awkward silence and a few childish giggles, as instead of thinking about the message of the quote (Is it a quote or a saying?), they’re thinking about a multimillionaire with a whip. Similarly, there is a superb book, based on a similar idea of proving equality set in a dystopian world with a class system ranked and distinguished by colours, called ‘Shades of Grey’. The author is the superb Jasper Fforde, whose ‘Thursday Next’ series I thoroughly recommend to any English Literature student – it is a very amusing commentary on classical literature whilst being completely supernatural and unique – check out “The Eyre Affair”. Yet now the title to poor Mr Fforde’s book is often misinterpreted by any book-store browser and rejected – or picked up by someone expecting similar ‘scenes to Fifty, who also reject, though possibly with a greater sense of disappointment.

The title has created a stigma attached to these words which interrupt and ruin the messages of other significant features of our culture That’s why I hate the damned books. The film too.
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21st century literature, Book review, Crime, Joseph Kanon, Second World War, The Good German

The Good German by Joseph Kanon

It is, I am fairly sure, just a coincidence that the books I have been reading recently have been about the second World War, and more specifically its aftermath. (Or is it? Is there something going on in my subconscious that is leading me to these books? Probably not!) This novel, a present, tells the story of a journalist arriving in Berlin shortly after the end of the war in Europe, but before the end of the Pacific war. I am sure it is revealing that despite having followed this character’s adventures over 500 or so pages, I can’t tell you his name. He is strangely unengaging for a first person character who gets the girl, solves the riddle, stands up to the bad guys, and does the right thing by war survivors. We are presumably intended to think of him as a hero, but despite the many attempts at realism I never once thought of him as a real person.

Arriving in Berlin he stumbles across a murder, which in time honoured fashion no-one else thinks is worth pursuing. He doggedly chases down the culprits all the while reigniting a pre-war romance, getting stories for his magazine, and observing impassively the destruction and despair all around him. This takes time, and a large supporting cast of characters who one by one are ticked off as potential suspects or bumped off along the way in a manner which removes all possible suspense. That’s not the interest of the book, of which surprisingly there was some. Berlin in mid to late 1945 was obviously devastated by the Allies bombardment and subsequent capture, and the behaviour of survivors is described here with some originality. Nazi scientists are hunted by the US and Russians, and their war crimes glibly overlooked. Other Nazis buy “forgiven” status from Jewish survivors, not because they are innocent but because the survivors are desperate for money. The huge differences between the surviving Berliners, desperate for shelter, food and water, live alongside Allied troops who seemingly want for nothing, creating a black market which is the origin of the murder. This is a complex environment for a murder mystery/thriller, where the foreground is less interesting that the context.

Both this novel and “Look Who’s Back” provide an interesting commentary on the question of why Germany fought to the bitter end, leading to the destruction of Berlin and other German cities, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. The Hitler of “Look Who’s Back” is clear – the punishment for losing the war is death – the Reich needed to be destroyed because it was unworthy, because it lost the war. This was not a long rearguard action hanging on for the super-weapon that never emerged, but a protracted suicide. Of course that is not how most Germans saw it. The perspective most often articulated in Kanon’s Berlin is that ordinary, good, Germans were the victims – that their cities were firebombed, their citizens targetted, long after the point they could effectively defend themselves, their women raped by rampaging Russians and others, then starved and frozen once the war ended. There is little or no understanding from Kanon’s good Germans that they are reaping what they sowed. It is unusual from a novel of this kind to have such a finely balanced discussion of difficult issues like this, and it sits uncomfortably with the other, much more conventional elements of the novel. (Incidentally, Anthony Beevor’s “Berlin” is very good on this point).

If you enjoy complex, and long, murder mysteries in the Le Carre tradition, you might enjoy this.

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21st century literature, Australian literature, Book review, Booker Prizewinner, Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

I was originally going to describe this Booker Prize winning novel as “a bit of a curate’s egg”, that is to say good in parts, but thinking about it further that would be wrong, unfair and confusing. Why so? The phrase derives, as I am sure you know, from a Punch cartoon of the late 19th century. It pictures a timid-looking curate eating breakfast. His host remarks: “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones.” The curate replies, desperate not to offend his eminent host and ultimate employer: “Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!”

So the phrase should mean something that is obviously and essentially bad, but described as only partly bad—its supposed good features credited with undue redeeming power. That was the original meaning at least – there is no such thing as a partly bad egg. But to be honest I have used the phrase slightly differently, to describe something that is indeed partly good, partly bad, but where the bad part is so overwhelmingly bad as to spoil the whole. A balloon with only a tiny hole in it still bursts. However, usage of the phrase quickly drifted from these meanings, and is now defined in Wikipedia as “something that is at least partly bad, but has some arguably redeeming features.” Which has got to be wrong – a bad egg has no redeeming features, however much the curate may wish it has to avoid the embarrassment of his situation.


Phrases like this change their meaning all the time, and it is not something I am going to get worked up about, but I intended to honour the memory of Punch by avoiding it to mean partly good. Which is what “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” was. It has some powerful descriptive passages, most strikingly the scenes in the Burma Death Railway POW camps, and also the escape from the forest fire at the end of the novel, but there are other much less successful parts of the novel. These less successful parts do not spoil the overall effect, even if they do bring it down a notch or two.

The novel opens with a first person narative by Dorrigo Evans, surgeon and World War 2 veteran. The time scheme is very fluid, and jumps around confusingly. Clearly this is for effect, but the overall impression is incoherence. We know Dorrigo survives the war, because we see him in old age, so some of the traditional suspense of a linear narrative is forfeit. Dorrigo has a romance with his uncle’s much younger wife, shortly before going off to war where he is quickly (in terms of the narrative) taken prisoner. The novel really only takes off when it reaches this point – the survivor’s account of the brutality of the Death Railway. This is unblinkingly horrific, vividly portrayed, and pretty disturbing. Flanagan shows some events from the perspective of the prison guards, and this insight into their thought processes and values humanises them to some extent. Nevertheless this is not a “we are all guilty in war” portrayal – there are good people and bad people here, just that the bad people remain human despite their barbarity. (An example – the Japanese forces supervising the building of the railroad were given insufficient tools and machinery to lay the track. So they had to force the prisoners to build the railway with just hand tools and back breaking labour, all the time on sub-starvation rations. No wonder so many died, but did the Japanese forces have the choice of just abandoning work on the lines? Did they have spare food and medicines they withheld from their prisoners?)

The war ends suddenly and almost in passing, and the horror comes to a close. The trauma lives on of course, although Dorrigo seems to cope remarkably well considering. His tragic romance with Ella is easily the least successful part of the novel. She believes he dies in the war, he thinks she has also died, so there is no post-war happy ever after. This is not particularly tragic nor moving, and even when they do finally meet they move on without speaking. Flanagan’s prose in these sections is at times horrible, sub-Mills and Boonian. For example (page 81) “Ella was kind, he told himself. And somewhere within him he pitied Ella, and buried even deeper was an understanding that they would both suffer because of her kindness and his pity. He hated her kindness and he feared his pity, and he wanted only to escape it all forever.” Yuck.

A few years back I made a valiant effort to read as many Booker Prize winning novels as possible. I was doing well until beaten by Hilary Mantell – I managed to finish “Wolf Hall”, but just couldn’t face “Bring up the Bodies”. The Narrow Road puts me back on track, and while I have some reservations I am glad I read it, expanding my knowledge of Australian contemporary literature along the way. But I have no inclination to delve into Flanagan’s back catalogue, which I think is the test of whether this really was prize-winning literature.

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21st century literature, Book review, Look Who's Back, Timur Vermes

Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes

The inside front and back covers of the paperback edition of this novel carry a large number of positive comments from reviewers (as well as a few unfunny imaginary comments form Stalin, Churchill, and bizarrely, Napoleon) including one from the Daily Express which called the novel “laugh-out-loud-funny”. The hyphens suggest this is not to be taken too literally, although how something can be “kind of” laugh out loud but not literally laugh out loud I don’t know. But it wasn’t. It just wasn’t funny. It wasn’t particularly offensive either, which I suspect the author was aiming for at times.

The premise is simply – Hitler comes back from the dead, and tries to make sense of modern Germany. Naturally the contrast between Berlin 1945 and 2015ish is striking, and where much of the attempts at humour derive. The German nation has a reputation – in the UK at least – as being humourless, and the clumsiness of this book underlines that stereotype. There is no attempt to explain this resurrection – we are just invited to accept it as fact, or rather to suspend our belief. The satire is heavy handed, with Hitler’s commentary on 21st century German politics being fairly predictable to say the least. Some of the jokes simply don’t translate, depending as they do on a knowledge of German contemporary culture. After the premise is quickly established I wondered how the author would treat the issue of the holocaust. Obviously a resurrected Hitler would not have any reservations about the murder of six million Jews, and putting these thoughts in his mouth without sufficient challenge would be simply sick. Vermes doesn’t duck this issue – Hitler’s secretary tries to resign because her grandmother’s family was murdered but he quickly reconciles her to the idea of continuing to work for him by charming her grandmother into accepting his goodwill. The Hitler character, through who’s eyes the novel is written, has not mellowed during his hibernation, but is portrayed as human, reasonably quick witted, and while uncompromising still able to accommodate the changes he sees in the world. He is no monster, and persuasively argues that a) he was elected through a fair and open democratic process, and that b) therefore his crimes, not that he sees them in this way, are those of the German people.

This is an uncomfortable book, that has been translated well but from which you rarely escape the knowledge that it is in translation. I was hoping that the author would attempt to rationalise the time travelling and resurrection aspects of the story, but he doesn’t bother. He also winds the novel up suddenly, giving every appearance of tiring of his material and characters. It’s an interesting premise, but that’s not enough to sustain this novel over 350 pages. If anything it made we want to read a serious biography of Hitler, which I suppose is not a bad result. But as for looking at modern Germany in a new light – sadly, no.

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21st century literature, Book review, Crime, Detective fiction

Supplementary: The Black-eyed Blonde – Benjamin Black (2)

A lot of the reviews of this novel praised the plotting, one going so far as to say it was better than Chandler’s. My impression on a first read was that the plot of the Black-eyed Blonde was fairly linear and straightforward, and Marlowe is something of a passive observer of the narrative rather than someone who shapes it. All, in fact, very un-Chandleresque. But it is worse. I had a spare half hour on the tube yesterday, and with nothing else to read I looked again at the first chapter of this novel. What I was looking for is whether Black’s attempts at Chandler’s imagery were successful or not. Broadly they are. Inevitably there are some misses, but an above average number of hits. I won’t quote any here because out of content they can look weak, but that’s not what I wanted to write about anyway.

The plot of the Black Eyed Blonde is simple enough. Marlowe is asked by the title character to find a missing person, Nico Peterson. After a few fruitless lines of enquiry, Marlowe asks the police if they know where Peterson is, and the information is quickly returned – he died in a hit and run accident a few weeks earlier. When Marlowe tells his client this her response is (end of chapter 4) “I know”. Marlowe is so shocked by this he actually has to ask her to repeat herself, which is in itself completely un-Marlowe like.

So why did she ask Marlowe to investigate Peterson’s disappearance when she knew that he had died in a hit and run accident. The answer she offers is that she saw Peterson alive a few weeks later, and therefore believed the accident was a fake, or a case of mistaken identity. But this doesn’t explain why she withheld this information from Marlowe when she first commissioned the case. What possible reason could she have had for not just omitting this vital information, but actively misleading him? When asked in chapter one when she first realised he was missing she tells Marlowe “I telephoned him a number of times and got no answer, Then I called at his house. The milk hadn’t been cancelled and the newspapers had been piling up on his porch”. Why would she do that if she knew he had been “killed” in a hit and run. Even if this was after the subsequent sighting, why not tell Marlowe this. I suppose you could argue she was testing Marlowe’s powers as an investigator, but someone’s death in an unsolved hit and run would be a matter of public record. The fact that Peterson’s neighbour has not heard of his “death” is unconvincing as well – in reality news like that would be in the local paper and spread quickly.

The simple reason why she misleads Marlowe is so that the author can have this plot twist. And that’s not good enough – you can’t simply have characters behave illogically just to have dramatic chapter endings. In the same way the mexican thugs would not have kidnapped, tortured and killed Peterson’s sister, but left Marlowe alive to identify them. We much later learn that Clare Cavendish, the eponymous blonde, is unwittingly helping drug smugglers who want to track Peterson down, he having stolen some of their drugs. All the more reason why they would want Marlowe to have all the available information, not waste time finding out things they already know.

This is just not good enough. Chandler’s plotting was always complex and yes, sometimes a bit besides the point. He did weld together short stories, and knowing that you can sometimes see the join. (I defy anyone not knowing that to spot, for example, that the Big Sleep is two separate narratives shunted together). But his characters never behaved irrationally like this just to engineer a plot twist, or a “dah, dah, da!!” moment.

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