John Banville, using his crime-writing pseudonym, has produced an entertaining, note-perfect piece of literary ventriloquism
Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman's film of The Long Goodbye. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MGM
As the post-Fleming James Bond franchise expands inexorably, Raymond Chandler fans quailed at the news that the estate of the late, great man had authorised another revival of Philip Marlowe. Would John Banville, writing under his mystery novel pseudonym Benjamin Black, be able to pull it off or would it be a Robert B Parkeresque fiasco? (Parker was memorably dismissed by Martin Amis for having turned Marlowe, that hard-boiled walker of lonely streets, into an "affable goon".
But Banville lets us know from the very start of The Black-Eyed Blonde that we are in the safest of hands here. "The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it's being watched," Marlowe tells us, as a blonde enters his heat-hazed office, regards him from a pair of black eyes – "black and deep as a mountain lake" – and regales him with a tale of a disappearing lover. And we're away, as Marlowe half-heartedly begins to investigate and is dragged into the seedy lives of the Los Angeles super-rich in the early 1950s.
Marlowe – of course – falls for the blonde, Clare Cavendish, a perfume heiress, and the disappearance of Nico Peterson turns out – of course – to be not entirely straightforward. As warnings abound, Marlowe ropes in his old mucker Bernie Ohls and muses on departed beauty Linda Loring.
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But Banville lets us know from the very start of The Black-Eyed Blonde that we are in the safest of hands here. "The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it's being watched," Marlowe tells us, as a blonde enters his heat-hazed office, regards him from a pair of black eyes – "black and deep as a mountain lake" – and regales him with a tale of a disappearing lover. And we're away, as Marlowe half-heartedly begins to investigate and is dragged into the seedy lives of the Los Angeles super-rich in the early 1950s.Marlowe – of course – falls for the blonde, Clare Cavendish, a perfume heiress, and the disappearance of Nico Peterson turns out – of course – to be not entirely straightforward. As warnings abound, Marlowe ropes in his old mucker Bernie Ohls and muses on departed beauty Linda Loring.
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