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. ( )

First edition , very fine

Parker thought he could fill Chandler's shoes with Poodle Springs. He was wrong. He is still wrong.

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. ( )