Sat 31 May 2014
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: ROBERT B. PARKER – Perchance to Dream.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
Allen J. Hubin
ROBERT B. PARKER – Perchance to Dream. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1991. Berkley, paperback, 1993.
I know I should have boned up on Raymond Chandler before tackling Perchance to Dream, Robert B. Parker’s sequel to Chandler’s The Big Sleep. But I didn’t, and my reading of Chandler was so long ago I can make no comparisons. I can say that, on its own, I found Perchance a wholly delightful treat.
Philip Marlowe is called back to the Sternwood mansion. General has died, but Vivian Sternwood still lives there. And her psychopathic sister Carmen, tucked away among the white coats in Sleep, has gone missing from Resthaven Sanitorium. So Marlowe goes looking.
Resthaven is run by a sleazeball doctor named Bonsentir, who is so well connected that police bow and scrape and wag their tails. Vivian has a gangster bedmate named Eddie Mars, and he’s mixed up in this as well. Marlowe is not easy to discourage, though various folks try in their own nasty ways, and he’s likely either to get dead or to the bottom of what’s going on…
Smooth of action, full of good lines and sharp images, this went down in one satisfying gulp.
Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 1991.
May 31st, 2014 at 10:29 am
Martin Amis, who reviewed this book for the NEW YORK TIMES, offered four sentences, two authentically Raymond Chandler, the other two by Robert B. Parker. Can you tell which is which?
(1) “The sunshine was as empty as a headwaiter’s smile.”
(2) “His grin had all the warmth of a pawnbroker examining your mother’s diamond.”
(3) “She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a business men’s lunch.”
(4) “The room was as charming as a heap of coffee grounds.”
To check how well you did, here are the answers:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/13/reviews/parker-perchanceamis.html
May 31st, 2014 at 11:06 am
Robert Parker did a good job of copying Chandler. Too bad his own series of novels got mired in the activities and dialog of the girlfriend, Susan and the black PI, Hawk.
June 3rd, 2014 at 8:38 pm
I hoped there would be a third and fourth Parker/Chandler outing, but he went back to Spenser’s by then tiresome dialogues with Susan and Hawk and the virtually plot-less later novels.
I was no fan of the other series either, but I do give his westerns some real credit, those were fresh and new.
I have to admit in Poodle Springs if I hadn’t known where Chandler ended I would not have been able to tell where Parker started.