Review of Denise Mina's Philip Marlowe remake, "The Second Murderer"

When Raymond Chandler died in 1959, the simile, his favored figure of speech, should have been retired. Nobody before or since has topped his gift of so precisely nailing something — a mood, a personality, an existential truth — through the deceptively simple device of comparing one thing to another. Take this corker from “The Big Sleep,” where Philip Marlowe surveys his new client, the ancient General Sternwood: “The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work showgirl uses her last good pair of stockings.” Genius.

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Many celebrated Chandler admirers — among them, Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville) and Robert B. Parker — have attempted to resurrect Marlowe in novels of their own. (The desire for more of Marlowe is understandable, since Chandler finished only seven novels starring the wry private eye with the soul of a melancholy poet.) But those Chandler-esque similes are a problem, even for the best of writers. With luck, imitators can generate a few, but typically they falter by trying too hard.

Scottish mystery writer Denise Mina’s new Chandler homage, “The Second Murderer,” is billed as the first attempt by a female author to re-create Marlowe. I guess that’s true. Pioneering feminist hard-boiled novelists Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton channeled Chandler and his contemporary, Dashiell Hammett, in their respective groundbreaking V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone mystery series, which debuted in the early 1980s, but neither author cared to resuscitate Marlowe himself.

As literary reincarnations go, Mina’s novel is uneven. There are scenes, such as this one describing Marlowe entering an office building near Skid Row in 1940s Los Angeles, in which the cadences and worldview and those tricky similes are spot on: “The building had seen better days. The tiled floor was missing some teeth and masking tape was holding some other bits in place. … An elderly doorman sagged at his desk. No wonder. … The brittle day light did his face no favours. He looked like a headache in a suit.”

But other passages disrupt the illusion: They crack under the weight of their ostentatiousness. Dressing to meet his wealthy client, Mina’s Chandler tells us: “I gargled mouthwash to cover the tang of whiskey and despair, changed into my second-best suit and a fresh shirt.” No, that mouthwash aims to do too much in that sentence.

The plot of “The Second Murderer” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then neither did the plots of Chandler’s novels. The oft-told anecdote about the film of “The Big Sleep” is too good not to retell here: Director Howard Hawks, puzzled by a loose end in the novel’s plot involving the murder of a character working as a chauffeur, sent a letter to Chandler asking, “Who killed Owen Taylor?” Chandler responded: “I don’t know.”

Mina’s Chandler is summoned to an estate overlooking Beverly Hills by a creepy rich guy named Chadwick Montgomery. The assignment is to find Montgomery’s wayward daughter, Chrissie, who’s skipped out on her wealthy but sexually bland fiancé.

Marlowe, however, is not the only gumshoe on the case. Montgomery has also hired a snappy dame — auburn-haired Anne Riordan — who runs an all-female detective agency. Sparks fly between Marlowe and his rival when they discuss the case in a cocktail lounge and she keeps up with him, wisecrack for wisecrack:

“Have you been getting more beautiful? …”

“Yes, Mr. Marlowe … I’ve been having injections of monkey gland beauty serum and it’s doing exactly what it says on the side of the barrel.”

Chase scenes, murders, double-crosses and sordidness ensue. What’s most striking about “The Second Murderer” (I’m not all that clear on who the first was) is Mina’s updating of Marlowe’s cultural attitudes.

As his acceptance of Anne Riordan as a fellow professional suggests, this Marlowe recognizes that women can be more than just dangerous dames or helpless frails.

Mina’s Marlowe is even accepting of those characters whose sexualities would have sent Chandler’s Marlowe reaching for the nearest slur. In “The Second Murderer,” for instance, Marlowe visits a “kittens-only” lesbian bar called Jane Jones’s Little Club and barely breaks a sweat.

Similarly, he expresses admiration for “a daisy” named Jimmy who’s nicknamed “The One” because he’s unashamed of being gay at a time when it’s illegal. Marlowe concludes a tribute to Jimmy’s impregnable self-respect by saying, “Every time I met Jimmy I felt better about life.”

Mina’s infusion of such enlightened attitudes into Marlowe’s psyche raises the question of just how much his character — and the hard-boiled novel itself — can be revised before it turns into something else. Soft-boiled maybe? Mina’s Marlowe adventure is fine, but it doesn’t leave this reader yearning for more; Chandler’s Marlowe novels always will.

Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.

A Philip Marlowe Mystery

By Denise Mina

Mulholland Books. 245 pp. $28

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