[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by SomeSteve

I'm reading Marlowe by John Banville (a.k.a. The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black), a Philip Marlowe novel.

Normally I wouldn't be interested in continuations of an author's series by someone else --

I'm firmly in the 'not interested in continuations' camp. For the most part, Marlowe's a cipher of a character. Aside from his interest in replaying famous chess games, there's little in the way of continuity between the books. So why bother writing more?

The real appeal for me of Chandler is Chandler.

After The Long Goodbye I have Playback. Then I'll have read all the mainstream Chandler available, including the collections The Simple Art of Murder and Trouble Is My Business.

But I think once I finish Playback, I'll take a crack at the newer collections of Chandler short stories from the pulps. The stories he cannibalized to create his novels.

...even started rereading The Big Sleep, but although it had been so long since I read it the first time, everything seemed so familiar that after a couple of chapters my attention flagged and I fell prey to the siren song of something else and was lured away.

Are you that way with the rest of his books? I had to read The Big Sleep something like three times before I thought I had fully grasped all that occurred (even Chandler couldn't follow all of it. He had no idea who killed the chauffeur), so like you I'm pretty familiar with it.

But you can just move on to the rest of his novels. Yeah, they all have Marlowe, but events from past books have no impact on future books. Marlowe has no life outside of whatever case he is working on.

I had the movie version of The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould (and, in a small role, a (fairly) young Arnold Schwarzenegger) on my watchlist, but I put off playing it for so long that it disappeared again from the streaming platform before I got to it. The last time I saw it must have been when it was a new movie in theaters.

I highly, highly recommend the movie The Long Goodbye. It's not very Chandler-esque and Elliot Gould isn't the Marlowe from the books (or maybe he is, but was pulled from the '40's to the '70's), but it's a great movie. And Gould is great in it. Watch the first ten minute segment, where Marlowe tries to fake out his cat with a different brand of catfood. If you don't enjoy that, you likely won't enjoy the rest of the film.

If you do watch it, notice that all the music in the film is the same song, just arranged differently for different situations. He listens to The Long Goodbye on his car stereo, then walks in to the store and the same song is now muzak, at another point hippies chant it.

I love Robert Altman and his style of directing and The Long Goodbye is one of my favorites.