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Loading... Perchance to Dream (1991)by Robert B. Parker
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 52 years after Chandler wrote the first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep, Robert B. Parker writes the sequel. Although I found it an OK read, it left a lot to be desired. Marlowe is a shadow of his old self, and the plot is weak and fairly predictable. Parker just isn't the writer that Chandler was. Although it was nice to visit with Marlowe again, I could have done without this one. ( ) A novel that absolutely did not need to be written. When Parker isn't ripping off Chinatown, he has his hero get all sentimental about the Sternwoods, suggesting Parker did not really understand the point of the original novel which put the Sternwoods at the center of rot and decay, environmental and social. Robert B. Parker still does a decent ventriloquist's act when taking on Raymond Chandler's genre-defining literary creation, but Perchance to Dream is not a patch on his previous effort, Poodle Springs. A sequel to Marlowe's 1939 debut The Big Sleep, Parker's book is interspersed with relevant passages from that earlier classic. It is an interesting technique that neither works nor doesn't work – it is just there – but it does make comparisons inevitable rather than moving the character or intellectual property (ugh) forward. Parker's plots are easier to follow than Chandler's, though his prose is noticeably inferior and his ending in this book is an anticlimactic squib of cartoonish villainy. If Perchance to Dream often seems more like a classy retrospective than a novel in its own right, well, there are worse things to be. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesPhilip Marlowe (9) Is a (non-series) sequel to
Set in Los Angeles, private eye Philip Marlowe moves deeper than ever into labyrinths of crime, duplicity, and murder. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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