{"id":9567,"date":"2022-03-14T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9567"},"modified":"2022-03-13T15:57:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-13T19:57:02","slug":"the-goodbye-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9567","title":{"rendered":"The Goodbye Coast"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In Joe Ide\u2019s newest crime thriller, The Goodbye Coast<\/em>, he abandons his popular crime-solver Isaiah Quintabe, in favor of a twenty-first century private investigator Philip Marlowe (yes!) who\u2019s working on two compelling missing persons cases at once. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his acknowledgements, Ide quotes Chandler himself, who once claimed there are no classics of crime and detection fiction, but Ide maintains that Chandler came closer than anyone. He was Ide\u2019s original writing inspiration, and that of many other writers, and attracted millions of fans. Movies made from his books helped define film noir, with Humphrey Bogart\u2019s Marlowe an indelible representation of the cynical, world-weary p.i. of hardboiled crime fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Undertaking to write what\u2019s billed as a modern version of such an icon is more than a bit cheeky. How well did Ide do? He succeeds to some extent\u2014he has the cynicism and wisecracking down and the occasional skewering of the Establishment. He leaves most of the hard drinking to a character invented for this story, Philip\u2019s father, Emmet Marlowe, a Los Angeles homicide detective on leave to dry out after the death of his wife, Philip\u2019s mother. The modern Marlowe shares his namesake\u2019s tendency for insubordination, which cost him his place in the police academy and led him to a mentorship with low-rent private detective, Basilio Ignacia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marlowe\u2019s new client is fading movie star Kendra James, whose husband Terry was shot dead on the beach in front of their Malibu home a few weeks earlier. Terry was a failed movie producer desperately trying for one last big score. His seventeen-year-old daughter Cody has gone missing, and Kendra wants Marlowe to find her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before long Basilio drops another case in Marlowe\u2019s lap\u2014unwanted, but there it is. A woman has flown in from London to search for her son Jeremy, kidnapped by her ex-husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The theme of parents and children\u2014and how these relationships can go terribly wrong, warping a person\u2019s actions and reactions\u2014permeates the book. In the case of Ren and her kidnapped son, the ex-husband is the problem, and she\u2019s become monomaniacal about getting Jeremy back; in the case of Kendra and Cody, neither has a compassionate or generous bone in their bodies. No way could a healthy relationship evolve. Marlowe gets along with his dad, mostly, because he\u2019s repressed his anger about his father\u2019s neglect of his mother as she was dying. Emmet\u2019s drinking shows he feels that shortcoming too, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While you can chuckle at the relentless snark of Cody, only because it\u2019s not directed at you, and enjoy the more civilized jibes of Ren (who\u2019s English, after all), neither one of these females listens to Marlowe or takes his advice. Stay in your car until I get there? Not a chance. Don\u2019t go there by yourself? Already out the door. Needless to say, their incautious behavior causes worlds of trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marlowe uses his connections in the film industry, mostly in the form of past clients who are still speaking to him, to try to get a lead on Jeremy. Once he\u2019s found Cody, he\u2019s suspicious of her stepmother\u2019s intentions and stashes her at his dad\u2019s house until he can sort things out. Unfortunately, the situation is far more complicated and deadly than he anticipates, involving the Russian mob, Armenian hitmen, a Bosnian assassin, and Cody\u2019s brother, a gay minor league baseball player.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a big fan of Ide\u2019s I.Q. books, I think he misses the mark here. There are just too many violent confrontations and climaxes. It\u2019s like a movie with endless car chases and shootouts. Non-stop action is tiring. At the end, I felt like somebody just beat me up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a rare period of quiet near the story\u2019s end, Marlowe takes some time to review his notes and comes up with a theory about who killed Terry that he thinks holds water. His conclusions come very close to violating a basic principle of mystery-writing: Don\u2019t introduce new clues at the end of the story. At least two pieces of his explanation relied on information I did not have. Possibly I missed these elements in the reading, but I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, one of the pleasures of reading Chandler is his unforgettable deployment of metaphor<\/a>. (My favorite: \u201cIt was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.\u201d) Ide is quite skilled with the language, and writes in an effective, forceful way, but, as this is a homage, I expected a few high-flown metaphors. Maybe they wouldn\u2019t feel right in 2022, but I missed them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Order here from Amazon<\/a>
Or Shop your local indie bookstore<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Joe Ide\u2019s newest crime thriller, The Goodbye Coast, he abandons his popular crime-solver Isaiah Quintabe, in favor of a twenty-first century private investigator Philip Marlowe (yes!) who\u2019s working on two compelling missing persons cases at once.  In his acknowledgements, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Talented crime writer Joe Ide's homage to the work of Raymond Chandler. Not quite enough Chandler for my taste.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,366,126],"tags":[1129,306,1969],"class_list":["post-9567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-drama","category-reading-2","tag-joe-ide","tag-raymond-chandler","tag-the-goodbye-coast"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2uj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9569,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9567\/revisions\/9569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}