Chandler and Parker
Sir: In his review of 'Poodle Springs' Mark Illis (19 May) writes that he believes that the join between Chandler's opening and Parker's continuation occurs around chap- ter 8. In fact Chandler wrote only the first four chapters, ending at the point where Linda Marlowe says, 'Any more of this conversation and I'll forget I'm arranging my dresses.'
Even had Chandler finished it himself, the book would probably have been in- ferior to the earlier Marlowe novels. After all, Playback, written several years after The Long Goodbye, which I believe Chandler had originally intended should be the last Marlowe book, was a poor shadow of its predecessors. Also, Chandler him- self, in a letter to Roger Machell, written as he was about to begin wht he called The Poodle Springs Story, said that `. . . my mind seems to lack a little or a lot of its exuberance'.
It is true, however, as Illis suggests, that Chandler was unhappy with the idea of a married Marlowe. 'A fellow of Marlowe's type shouldn't get married,' he wrote to Maurice Guinness a few weeks before he died, 'I feel that your idea that he should be married . . . is quite out of character. . . . I don't think it will last.'
D. G. Tallis
7 Pound Close, Yarnton, Oxford
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