Friday 18 February 2022

#BlogTour - The Goodbye Coast by Joe Ide

From the Publisher -The seductive and relentless figure of Raymond Chandler’s detective, Philip Marlowe, is vividly re-imagined in present-day Los Angeles. Here is a city of scheming Malibu actresses, ruthless gang members, virulent inequality, and washed-out police. Acclaimed and award-winning novelist Joe Ide imagines a Marlowe very much of our time: he’s a quiet, lonely, and remarkably capable and confident private detective, though he lives beneath the shadow of his father, a once-decorated LAPD homicide detective, famous throughout the city, who’s given in to drink after the death of Marlowe’s mother.
 
Marlowe, against his better judgement, accepts two missing person cases, the first a daughter of a faded, tyrannical Hollywood starlet, and the second, a British child stolen from his mother by his father. At the center of COAST is Marlowe’s troubled and confounding relationship with his father, a son who despises yet respects his dad, and a dad who’s unable to hide his bitter disappointment with his grown boy. Together, they will realize that one of their clients may be responsible for murder of her own husband, a washed-up director in debt to Albanian and Russian gangsters, and that the client’s trouble-making daughter may not be what she seems.

Steeped in the richly detailed ethnic neighbourhoods of modern LA, Ide’s GOODBYE COAST is a bold recreation that is viciously funny, ingeniously plotted, and surprisingly tender.



“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”


Raymond Chandler’s work is very important to me. THE LITTLE SISTER, Chandler’s fifth Philip Marlowe novel, was my introduction to crime fiction and I then went back and read them all in order from THE BIG SLEEP to PLAYBACK. I regularly re-read them, a leather-bound copy of the Penguin paperback of THE BIG SLEEP being a particularly valued possession. My eldest son is named Philip, largely due to the quotation above from Chandler’s essay THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER. I have a lot invested in Philip Marlowe and so, despite having enjoyed Joe Ide’s IQ novels, approached his ‘modernisation’ of Marlowe with no little trepidation.


Ide’s Marlowe is an unlicensed PI in 21st Century Los Angeles and, from the first few pages, it is evident that this is a very different Marlowe. Ide utilises a third person narration rather than Chandler’s first person; Marlowe, a loner in the original books, has a strained relationship with his father, a functioning alcoholic police officer. The plot of THE GOODBYE COAST is fast moving and gripping as Marlowe works two cases, searching for the missing teenage stepdaughter of a faded Hollywood actress while also trying to help an Englishwoman whose estranged husband has taken their son to the United States without agreement. In both cases he is aided, at times hindered, by his father. 


Marlowe himself is quick-witted, witty and likeable. He is intelligent and principled, although not infallible; his mistakes often lead him into unexpected, frequently funny, situations. The City of Los Angeles, very much changed from the 1940s, is as much a character in the story as Chandler’s LA was. Marlowe’s local knowledge and his ability to interact across various ethnic neighbourhoods help to propel the story forward. The characters are all well drawn and the dialogue is excellent. The fading star, Kendra, and her daughter, Cody, are both superbly, annoyingly selfish and self-centred, and the relationship between the latter and Marlowe’s father is sitcom worthy.


Coming to the novel I was concerned that Ide’s Philip Marlowe would not be Chandler’s Marlowe, and he’s not, and he’s not my Marlowe, but I am not sure that really matters. Ide has created a detective for the 2020s, ‘an honourable man’ who shares the spirit of his predecessor and embodies the qualities and character Chandler would demand of his hero. THE GOODBYE COAST is a very entertaining modern detective story in its own right and that Joe Ide’s Philip Marlowe shares traits with the original is a bonus.






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