THE MARLOW CHRONICLES

Maybe somebody wrote a play, a real bad play, and maybe nobody would produce it, so maybe somebody decided to give it a bestseller-ish title and call it a novel. That somebody could be Lawrence Sanders and that novel could be The Marlowe Chronicles-nearly all dialogue and stage directions, divided into acts and scenes, and tailored for the N.Y./Jewish theater crowd. Even they won't like it. Actor Toby Marlowe, informed by Doctor Jake that he has six months to live (his pancreas), treats the death sentence, like everything else in life, as a juicy scene to play to the balcony. The wisecracks (you warm the hearties of my cock) and mock-soliloquies (the slings and arrows of unrequited lust) never stop, even when common-law wife Cyn—after 40 years, they finally make it legal—and son David get teary. Of course, David has his own problems: a pregnant girlfriend who won't marry him and the shadow of Toby's success choking his fledgling acting career. Father and son debate what Will meant with Hamlet, a Thelma-Rittery maid enters and exits laughing, and—except for three flashbacks to remembered sex—the novelistic knacks that Sanders has shown (The Anderson Tapes, The First Deadly Sin) are entirely, as Toby would say, farblondjet. Gushingly stage-struck and as funny as Medea.