Playback

Raymond Chandler completed only seven Philip Marlowe novels, a series that started with 1939’s The Big Sleep and culminated in Playback, published a year before the author’s death in 1959. Among his papers were four chapters of an unfinished novel, Poodle Springs, the title of which plays off a too-cute renaming of Palm Springs.

Three decades later, to commemorate the centenary of Chandler’s birth, his estate asked Robert B. Parker to finish the Palm Springs novel. Parker did and went on to write a sequel to The Big Sleep, 1991’s Perchance to Dream, which involves the detective’s search for the missing Carmen Sternwood, his first damsel in distress. Since then, the estate has authorized novels by writers including John Banville, who in 2014 (as Benjamin Black) published The Black-Eyed Blonde, and Lawrence Osborne, whose elegiac Only to Sleep (2018) finds Marlowe at 72, retired in Mexico.

Now comes The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina, the first woman authorized to write a Marlowe novel. The Glasgow native brings her own credibility to the task. Among the more noteworthy exemplars of tartan noir—a loose moniker that encompasses the bleakness of William McIlvanney as well as the hard-boiled worldview of Ian Rankin—Mina’s novels toggle between noir’s dark humor and a contemporary feminist rage.

Those skills are in evidence in the opening scenes of The Second Murderer, as Mina quickly establishes the first-person voice of Marlowe: “I was in my office, feet up, making use of a bottle of mood-straightener I kept in the desk.” The detective has misgivings about a tidily solved murder; a 60-year-old former child star had hired him to find her missing husband, a bit player in cowboy pictures. The detective knows the type too well: “The movie colony is made up of people with burning ambition and these people were warming their hands on that fire.”

But Marlowe doesn’t have time to ponder why the actor’s murder troubles him because he is summoned to the home of Chadwick Montgomery III. Montgomery’s estate sits high in Beverly Hills, and it doesn’t disappoint. “However dusty and dry or smoggy the city was,” Mina writes, “up at the Montgomery estate the grass glowed with colour and moisture, the trees were lush and shady, the fruit was always ripe and plentiful.”

Montgomery’s factotum, Anneliese Lyle, seems just as mythic, the perfect evocation of a Chandler femme fatale. “She was tall and slim and so streamlined she looked like a different species entirely,” Mina writes, “as if an architect got a woman and shaved off all the good bits.” Anneliese stands sentry over the ailing Montgomery, but she tips Marlowe to the problem: Montgomery’s daughter and sole heir, Chrissie, is missing, gone from the estate sometime after celebrating her engagement to Bruce MacIntosh, scion of a wealthy Savannah, Georgia, family. Desperate for her return, Montgomery will pay not only Marlowe’s daily rate but also a $1,000 bonus.

Marlowe soon learns that Chrissie left under her own steam and had help calling a cab from his own former client Jimmy the One. Employed by her family to work at the estate, he recommended Marlowe for the job. The question is why Montgomery would hire Marlowe instead of one of the bigger, Downtown firms.

Maybe it’s because Marlowe gets results. He finds the young woman in less than 24 hours. Still, even as he tracks her, the heiress leads him into trouble. This starts with a drunken ramble through the city’s low-down bars, then moves to an art gallery in the Bradbury Building while leaving dead bodies all over town.

That’s a rasher of guilt Marlowe finds hard to swallow, and he’s not alone. Montgomery has also hired Anne Riordan, whom readers may remember from Farewell, My Lovely as the daughter of a former police chief who does a lot of the detective work herself. In Mina’s reimagining, Riordan has started her own detective firm, which boasts four investigators and half a dozen support staff. Her evolution as equal and competitor to Marlowe is one of the delights of The Second Murderer. It’s hard to ignore the contrast between her, Anneliese, and Chrissie, each archetypal in a certain sense but all with a few surprises up their sleeves.

Mina’s Marlowe is a smart, inspired take on a character we have come to take for granted, who’s as problematic as he is adored. The Second Murderer takes him on a slightly different trajectory, both honoring him and challenging him to be a better man for a changing world.•