Book review: The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina

The trend for literary resurrections has been going on for quite a while. It was only four years after the death of Ian Fleming that Kingsley Amis, under the pseudonym Robert Markham, wrote Colonel Sun, the first of the James Bond continuation novels. Since then the franchise has grown exponentially, with writers such as Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd having a crack at the double-0 whip (and while no female author has written a Bond novel, Kim Sherwood is creating an officially-sanctioned trilogy of novels set in Bond’s world).

Sophie Hannah has written elegant novels featuring Hercule Poirot; Ben Schott has made a decent fist of writing new Jeeves and Wooster stories. Mina’s novel, then, neatly fits into what is fast becoming a sub-genre all of its own.

The Second Murderer certainly has a strong set-up. Marlowe is fretting over a case that he solved, but doesn’t feel he really solved it. The line “I don’t usually drink in the office at ten thirty in the morning but I had a bad taste to wash away” situates the reader precisely in the world of the “shop-soiled Galahad”. Even more so do the descriptions of heat and haze in Los Angeles. Dust, humidity and claustrophobia all seem to conspire against Mina’s Marlowe as much as toughs, thugs and cops.

The opening is, however, a piece of misdirection. The primary narrative is not about the Pasco Pete case. Instead, a clipped phone call summons him to the Montgomery Estate in Beverley Hills. The aging patriarch and his secretary (and squeeze) want him to find his daughter, Chrissie, who absconded on the night of her engagement party. Marlowe has two dilemmas. The first is that he suspects Chrissie might have good reasons not to want to be found. The second is that he clocks pretty quickly that they have hired another private investigator as well.

Mina is always good on the gradations and vagaries of class. The Montgomery Estate is monied, but there is kind of craquelure of decay and impersonation over it all. The course of the investigation will take Marlowe to Skid Row, were the reader can almost smell the settings. It also takes him by circuitous routes to shabby-genteel art galleries, and a subplot which allows Mina/Marlowe to make entertainingly sarcastic comments about the pretentions of modern art.

The Second Murderer is a good, lazy afternoon read. Mina is – this may be heresy – better at plotting than Chandler. Everything ties up, if in a slightly squint, unloosened tie. Chandler famously was asked by Howard Hawks who had killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep and replied to a friend “Dammit, I don’t know either.” Maybe his claim to only be able to finish writing a novel when drunk might have some bearing on this.

In many ways, you don’t read Chandler for plot; you read him for style. WH Auden claimed he was the best prose stylist in America, and he is certainly instantly recognisable with phrases like “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window” or “about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food”. It is difficult indeed not to make the imitation, or homage, sound like parody; but Mina is deft. So this is her: “She didn’t seem to have eyelashes on her tiny eyes. If she did, they were hiding. She was fifty and not one bit sorry about it”, or, describing modern art, Marlowe is bemused by “a cup on a table that seemed to be turning inside-out at the same time as turning outside-in”. It is more in the lilt than the sass. Other writers, notably Jonathan Lethem in Gun, With Occasional Music have pushed the Chandler style to extremities of surrealism. Mina deploys it but respects it.

It is probably forgotten that The Big Sleep dealt with homosexuality. It plays a part here, but more significant is the suppurating violence against women, and not just the platinum blondes. Marlowe is constantly being accused of wanting to save women, but there is much from which they need saved. Most of the men we encounter are violent, alcoholic, self-important, fraudulent or consumed by anger. What Mina gets exactly right – done in a scene where Marlowe is offered an exorbitant amount of money – is that Marlowe is a man who can say no. He is also curiously generous, particularly with the money of the wealthy.

This is a rare kind of work. It does not ventriloquise Chandler, but takes his “mythos” – to use a word in the novel – and creates something thoroughly entertaining and deeply serious. At the end I had one lingering question. Will Mina write another Philip Marlowe mystery? I don’t know, but there are sufficient threads that might be teased out anon. One thing I do know is that most franchises don’t want one-offs, even if the current incumbent is changed. On the basis of this premiere performance, I can envisage a sequel. That said, it is not as if Mina does not have other irons in the fire.

The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina, Harvill Secker, £14.99