October 24, 2008
Raymond Chandler and the Rise of the Zombie Novels (1958)
Zombies are hot in popular culture — Sean battled them in the movies and Mel Brooks' son scored a hit with "World War Z" — but truth be told, these shambling, animated corpses have been wandering about for decades, feasting on the brains of readers everywhere.These literary zombies are novels and literary characters that have died when their creators did, only to be resurrected, for profit and for love, at the hands of others.
Raymond Chandler created his zombie today when he began work on "Poodle Springs," his newest Philip Marlowe novel. Ray himself wasn't in too good a shape, either. His longtime wife, Cissy, had died, and the effects of chronic alcoholism had caught up with him, wrecking his health. He also was involved with a woman who was more interested in what little money he had left than in him, much to the distress of friends who tried to help him.
Unfortunately, Chandler didn't live to see "Poodle Springs" — which was his name for Palm Springs, the hot, dry, desert town he lived near for awhile. Five months later, he died of pneumonia in a hospital. The briefcase by his bed contained the first seventeen pages of the novel he wouldn't get to finish.
Thirty years later, Robert B. Parker took a break from his novels about Spencer, and not only finished "Poodle Springs" (which was Chandler's description of Palm Springs), but kept poor Marlowe shambling about for the sequel, "Perchance to Dream."
No one knows the name of the first zombie novel, but there have been many notable attempts:
* Jill Paton Walsh took the first eight chapters of Dorothy L. Sayers' novel about Lord Peter Wimsey, "Thrones, Dominations," and finished it. She also wrote a sequel, "A Presumption of Death," based on Sayers' articles speculating about life during World War II for the Wimsey family.
* Frank Herbert's "Dune" series still shambles across the land, thanks to Herbert's son, Brian, who with Kevin J. Anderson raided his father's file cabinets for unfinished manuscripts, outlines and notes.
* Recently, J.R.R. Tolkien's son Christopher published "The Children of Húrin," based on his father's manuscripts.
* Even Jane Austen and Charles Dickens' have been revived. There are no less than seven version of Austen's "Sanditon," while Dickens' unfinished "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" had been finished not once, but at least four times. Another version, by songwriter Rupert Holmes, was turned into a musical.
* When Robert Jordan died, his "Wheel of Time" fantasy trilogy series lay unfinished at 11 books. Brandon Sanderson was chosen last year to write the final volume.
* Douglas Adams added a fifth "Hitchhiker's Guide" novel to his trilogy, "The Salmon of Doubt" by the publisher's expedience act of downloading the contents of Adams' hard drive and reassembling the pieces the best they knew how. Unfortunately, it showed just how much genius the world lost with Adams' unexpected death. Dauntless, the publisher and Adams' estate are going to try again, enlisting Eoin Colfer (of the Artemis Fowl series) to attempt a new novel.
* Zane Grey and Erle Stanley Garner have the unique distinction of acting as their own zombies. Both writers were so prolific that they left several completed novels in the publishing pipeline after their deaths.
Born: Sara Josepha Hale, author, poet, Newport, N.H., 1788; Moss Hart, playwright, memoirist, New York City, 1904; Denise Levertov, poet, Ilford, Essex, 1923; Jim Brosnan, baseball player, novelist, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1929.
Died: Daniel Webster, orator, politician, Marshfield, Mass., 1852; Richard Hofstadter, historian, New York City, 1970; Gene Roddenberry, television producer, Santa Monica, Calif., 1991.
Quote for the Day: — All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say ‘No' and said "Yes.'" Moss Hart, who was born today in 1904
Also from the Reader's Almanac:
- Gore Vidal Takes Down William F. Buckley (1968)
- Desiderata rises from the grave (1965)
- The Hemingway to go (1961)
- Malcolm Lowry's mysterious death (1957)
- Red scare squashes Sam Spade's creator (1951)
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