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Raymond Chandler's incomparable private eye is back, pulled by a red-haired, green-eyed young heiress into the most difficult and dangerous case of his career Raymond Chandler's incomparable private eye is back, pulled by a seductive young heiress into the most difficult and dangerous case of his career "It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it's being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere." So begins The Black-Eyed Blonde , a new novel featuring Philip Marlowe-yes, that Philip Marlowe. Channeling Raymond Chandler, Benjamin Black has brought Marlowe back to life for a new adventure on the mean streets of Bay City, California. It is the early 1950s, Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson. Marlowe sets off on his search, but almost immediately discovers that Peterson's disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City's richest families and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune. Only Benjamin Black, a modern master of the genre, could write a new Philip Marlowe novel that has all the panache and charm of the originals while delivering a story that is as sharp and fresh as today's best crime fiction.
Critiques (6)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Veteran narrator Boutsikaris turns in a mixed performance in this audio edition of Black's resurrection of Raymond Chandler's intrepid Bay City PI Philip Marlowe. In classic noir tradition, it all starts with a black-eyed class act walking into Marlowe's office looking to hire the gumshoe to find missing lover Nico Peterson. Marlowe agrees to take the case, but of course nothing is what it seems, and the mean streets of the early 1950s are the dark and twisted kind, where violence, deceit, and corruption are simply the costs of doing business. Boutsikaris does a standout job of bringing Black's characters to life. Thug or cop, heiress or moll, he gives them all distinct voices that fit well with the book's Chandleresque prose and dialogue. But Boutsikaris's Marlowe isn't quite right. While the narrator offers a perfectly serviceable reading that certainly hits all the right notes, his characterization comes across as a softer, gentler creation, and less the tough, tarnished knight who sees the sins of the world with a weary, cynical eye. A Henry Holt hardcover. (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Booklist
He put out his right hand for me to shake. It was like being given a sleek, cool-skinned animal to hold for a moment or two. That must be Philip Marlowe talking, right? It is, sort of. Black (the mystery-writing pseudonym for Irish writer John Banville) offers a stylish homage to Raymond Chandler in this tightly written caper that picks up Marlowe's life from the point the series ended. Naturally, it begins with a leggy blonde easing her silky body into Marlowe's office chair and spinning a story that turns out to be about half poppycock. Marlowe takes the bait, of course, and begins to search for a con man whose death may have been exaggerated. The plot is nearly impenetrable in classic Chandler fashion, and there are numerous allusions to the earlier books, including the surprise appearance of a character from The Long Goodbye whose presence will either enrage or enthrall devoted fans. The focus, though, as it was for Chandler, is on style and mood, and the Irishman, perhaps surprisingly, nails both. The homage game is a tricky one to play, but Black makes all the right moves. Great fun for Chandlerians.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist
Critique du New York Review of Books
ABOUT TWO-THIRDS OF the way through "The Black-Eyed Blonde," Philip Marlowe - that name might ring a bell - tells us he "lit up another cancer stick." For a novel set in the early 1950s, this sounded anachronistic, so I went online to investigate. While a connection between tobacco and cancer was suggested in the 1930s in Germany, the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang places the earliest use of "cancer stick" at 1959 - which is not to say that it wasn't used before then. That I made such an effort to research two insignificant words doesn't merely peg me as the guy you don't want to be stuck with at a party; it says something about "The Black-Eyed Blonde," Benjamin Black's latest mystery, and his first to feature Raymond Chandler's famous private eye. Black recreates Marlowe's voice (that is, Chandler writing Marlowe's first-person narration) with such startling mimicry that a reader (this one, at least) can't help cynically seeking out its flaws. Cancer sticks aside, "The Black-Eyed Blonde" could be passed off as a newly discovered Chandler manuscript found in some dusty La Jolla closet, leaving only linguistic detectives to ferret out the fraud. It's no secret that Benjamin Black is the mystery-writing pseudonym of the Irish novelist John Banville, and so the idea of this prizewinning writer channeling one of the most recognizably literary of crime novelists makes a good deal of sense. It's a challenge Banville obviously approached with pleasure, reveling in the opportunity to work up the ornate similes that are the stamp of Chandler's prose. We meet Black's Marlowe at the window of his office in the Cahuenga Building, peering down as a long-legged woman crosses the street, noting from the way she carefully checks for traffic that "she must have been so good when she was a little girl." Since this is the fictional Bay City, you can bet she isn't so good anymore. She is Clare Cavendish (née Langrishe), and she's a wealthy perfume heiress. Within minutes, she turns up in Marlowe's office - a "blonde with black eyes" - to ask for help finding her old lover, Nico Peterson, who has been missing for two months. Given the track record of beautiful blondes walking into private investigators' offices, we know there's a lot more to her story. The twists and turns that follow involve missing persons, stone-cold Mexican hit men, easy-to-anger cops (Bernie Ohls, an old friend) and the impenetrable rich, as well as the participants in a gruesome and nearly fatal encounter at the indoor pool of the Cahuilla Club. It's all par for the course for Marlowe, who suffers beatings and stoically faces heartbreak, drinking his way through a heady labyrinth of double-crosses that leads to a visit from an old friend in a blood-soaked drawing room. It is, as they say, a page turner, and terrific fun. There are intimations of Black's Irish background in Clare Cavendish's mother, Dorothea Langrishe, "a tough old dame" whose husband, devoted to Michael Collins's cause, was killed in the Irish civil war in a particularly terrifying fashion. Another clue appears when Marlowe heads off to the Bull and Bear, noting that "I can't decide which are worse, bars that pretend to be Irish, with their plastic shamrocks and shillelaghs, or Cockney-fied joints like the Bull. I could describe it, but I haven't the heart." Like the model Black is following, the overall story is less important than the individual scenes, and charting the cause and effect from Marlowe's office to the corpse in the final pages may require a slug of whiskey and an aspirin. "Life is far more messy and disconnected than we let ourselves admit," Marlowe tells us. "Wanting things to make sense and be nice and orderly, we keep making up plots and forcing them on the way things really are. It's one of our weaknesses, but we cling to it for dear life, since without it there'd be no life at all, dear or otherwise." Despite the loyalty to Chandler that Black displays here, by the end of "The Black-Eyed Blonde" there's an odd emptiness. Not merely the existential emptiness of the noir novel, where the hero is left, as always, alone, but a deeper emptiness, a suggestion that literary style has triumphed over content, leaving a hollowed-out place where the emotion should have been. Halfway through, I was already asking myself a poisonous question: Why write a book that reads so completely like Raymond Chandler 61 years after the publication of "The Long Goodbye," his last great novel? By now the conventions of noir fiction, as created by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, have become such a part of our world, and so often parodied, that we can almost predict them before opening the next book. The femme fatale walking into the P.I.'s office and twisting him around her pretty finger while lying through her teeth; the drinking and the bursts of violence; the high-society folks with secrets to sweep under the rug; the soulless thugs and surly cops; and the dead who are, inevitably, not dead. Black has included them all here - and well - yet despite the impressiveness of his achievement, a reader in 2014 expects something fresher, if only the inversion of a few conventions. I was reminded of Jorge Luis Borges's satirical story "Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote,'" in which a 20th-century writer is reproducing "Don Quixote" word for word. The argument is that the new version is an original work because Menard's times, life experience and purpose are different from those of Cervantes. What was once a picaresque novel is now a historical novel written, impressively, in an archaic language. "The Black-Eyed Blonde," a novel that reads like a lost Chandler original but is written by a contemporary author, raises the question: What, beyond imitation and a paycheck, is Black's purpose? AM I BEING a killjoy? Probably, because despite my complaints I found "The Black-Eyed Blonde" entertaining, and any fan of Chandler's work is going to enjoy it. Yet when a novelist of Banville's stature resurrects one of the genre's luminaries, he inspires the hope that this new outing will compete with Chandler and Marlowe's finest appearances, even in some small postmodern way. Instead, this walk down the mean streets feels like one we've already taken in some half-forgotten Bogart movie, returning to a time when men were men and the women were so alluring, as the line from "Farewell, My Lovely" goes, they could "make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." Then again, that may be justification enough. 'Life is far more messy and disconnected,' Marlowe reflects, 'than we ... admit.' OLEN STEINHAUER is the author of eight novels, including "The Tourist." His ninth, "The Cairo Affair," will be published this month.
Critique du Guardian
The 23rd novel by the Irish writer John Banville feels like a literary equivalent of Winston Churchill's description of Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". The Black-Eyed Blonde represents a literary brand-name wrapped in a pseudonym inside a Man Booker prize winner. Although this is Banville's attempt at a novel in the style of the Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler, he has chosen to publish it under the name of Benjamin Black, the identity he has adopted for a series of crime novels (including Christine Falls and Holy Orders) featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist in the 1950s. Black-Banville remains in the same decade for this Marlowe makeover, which finds the private eye living in the rented residence on Yucca Avenue in Los Angeles that he occupied in the final Chandler books. The Long Good-bye and Playback were set in the early 50s, and charted Marlowe's attraction to and eventual marriage proposal from the heiress Linda Loring. As Black-Banville's Marlowe expresses the hope of one day marrying Loring, The Black-Eyed Blonde seems to sit between the last two completed Chandlers and Poodle Springs, the final, unfinished Marlowe novel, which Robert B Parker finished in a previous authorised continuation, commissioned by the Chandler estate to mark the author's centenary. The plot follows the master's hand. On a listless LA day, a beautiful young woman turns up in the PI's office. She is Mrs Clare Cavendish, heiress to a perfume fortune built by an Irish immigrant family, the Langrishes. For tantalisingly unclear reasons, Mrs C has hired Marlowe to find a former lover, Nico Peterson, who has disappeared. The private eye soon learns that Peterson has been killed and cremated, although this information becomes increasingly questionable as the investigator follows the trail deeper into the scent company. The reputation of the original novels rests largely on the tone of the prose and the character of Marlowe. As the books are narrated in the first person, these are closely linked, so any Chandler stand-in must convincingly carry on both. But a popular perception has developed that Chandler's style consisted entirely of witty metaphors and witticisms stitched together. In fact, between the anthologised one-liners, the language is often looser and more discursive, but so strong is the legend of Chandler's high style that any pretenders will be judged on how successfully they achieve it. The Irish understudy takes on Chandler's habits convincingly. The Marlowe books have a paradoxical tone of energetic weariness, which this imitation echoes in numerous lines. Visiting a witness, the detective reports that he "lowered himself into one of the armchairs. It was so deep my knees nearly gave me an uppercut." Painted roses on a bedside lamp throw shadows that look like "bloodstains someone had started to wash away and then given up on". The biggest decision for any literary ventriloquist is to what extent simply to transplant the central character, or, just as importantly, any of the actors who have played the role on screen. Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum are probably the Connery and Craig of the Marlowe adaptations and the protagonist of The Black-Eyed Blonde is easy to visualise as an older Bogart. Black-Banville's Marlowe has begun to worry about the medical effects of all the drinking and smoking, but is otherwise recognisably the figure of the originals: chess-playing, introspective, sensitive, self-hating. "Women are not the only thing I don't understand - I don't understand myself either, not one little bit." What Banville brings to Chandler is perhaps an enhanced literary sensibility. His Marlowe is alert to nuances of language, delighted when the name of Mrs Langrishe is accidentally recorded in a message as "Mrs Languish", and thrilled when an interrogatee uses the word "milksop", which he has previously only ever seen written down. Banville was once cast as the epitome of serious, prize-winning literary fiction, but the subsequent decade seems to have unleashed a pleasure in plot and playfulness that wasn't evident before. Even while routinely trashing crime novels, in interviews and at festivals, as "cheap", he has published them at the rate of almost one a year and now seems to have concluded that he would rather add to his shelf a Black-Chandler rather than a Black or a Banville. The genre of new books by dead writers is a curious and questionable one, but Banville and his crime-writing pseudonym have played the game as well as anyone could. Mark Lawson's The Deaths is published by Picador. To order The Black-Eyed Blonde for pounds 12.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Mark Lawson The 23rd novel by the Irish writer John Banville feels like a literary equivalent of Winston Churchill's description of Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". The Black-Eyed Blonde represents a literary brand-name wrapped in a pseudonym inside a Man Booker prize winner. Although this is Banville's attempt at a novel in the style of the Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler, he has chosen to publish it under the name of Benjamin Black, the identity he has adopted for a series of crime novels (including Christine Falls and Holy Orders) featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist in the 1950s. Black-Banville remains in the same decade for this Marlowe makeover, which finds the private eye living in the rented residence on Yucca Avenue in Los Angeles that he occupied in the final Chandler books. The Long Good-bye and Playback were set in the early 50s, and charted Marlowe's attraction to and eventual marriage proposal from the heiress Linda Loring. As Black-Banville's Marlowe expresses the hope of one day marrying Loring, The Black-Eyed Blonde seems to sit between the last two completed Chandlers and Poodle Springs, the final, unfinished Marlowe novel, which Robert B Parker finished in a previous authorised continuation, commissioned by the Chandler estate to mark the author's centenary. - Mark Lawson.
Critique de Kirkus
Man Booker Prizewinning novelist John Banville, already disguised as mystery writer Black (Holy Orders, 2013, etc.), goes under even deeper cover to imitate Raymond Chandler in this flavorsome pastiche. Nobody knows better than Clare Cavendish that self-styled Hollywood agent Nico Peterson is dead. Clare saw her ex-lover killed by a hit-and-run driver outside the Cahuilla Club two months ago. But she hires peerless shamus Philip Marlowe to find him anyway sincethough she doesn't tell Marlowe this part at firstshe's just seen Nico in San Francisco, clearly alive. Marlowe follows the obvious leads without results. Sgt. Joe Green at Central Homicide is naturally skeptical of the unnamed client's claim. Nico's one marginally successful client, starlet Mandy Rogers, says she knows nothing about him, and he wasn't her agent anyway. Floyd Hanson, the Cahuilla Club manager who identified the corpse, has nothing to add to what he told the cops. The closest thing to a break in the case is Marlowe's conversation with Nico's sister, which is interrupted when she's kidnapped by a pair of Mexicans and later killed. Clearly there's more to the story than anyone's telling. But the most suspicious character is (surprise!) Marlowe's client, who's clearly up to her mascara in unsavory connections to big money, big crime and the big sleep. Black's plotting is no better than Chandler's, but he has Marlowe's voice down to a fault. Both the dialogue and the narration crawl with overblown, Chandler-esque similes ("He looked like a scaled-down version of Cecil B. DeMille crossed with a retired lion tamer"), and devotees will recognize borrowings from Farewell, My Lovely, The Little Sister and, most unforgivably, The Long Goodbye, which Black's audacious finale makes just a little bit longer. The portrait of 1950s LA is less precise than Chandler's, but the aging, reflective Marlowe is appropriately sententious. A treat for fans, even if they end up throwing it across the room.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du Library Journal
The titular black-eyed blonde of Black's tribute to Raymond Chandler is Philip Marlowe's new client, who wants the detective to find a missing former boyfriend. But Marlowe soon learns that the boyfriend is in the morgue, and the case grows more complicated as he searches from the mansions of the city's wealthiest families to the seediest dive bars to discover why this man is so important to his client. As the bodies pile up, Marlowe struggles to separate the lies from the truth, with some grudging help from his few friends in the police department. With perhaps fewer memorable descriptions that characterized Robert B. Parker's Marlowe novels Poodle Springs and Perchance To Dream, Black (A Death in Summer; Vengeance) does deliver a more complex and satisfying mystery than other authors have done in the past. VERDICT This latest incarnation of Chandler's sleuth will appeal to fans of Chandler and Marlowe, but newcomers to one of the first great PIs in crime fiction will find much to enjoy here as well. [See Prepub Alert, 10/15/13.]-Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
