![]() As warnings abound, Marlowe ropes in his old mucker Bernie Ohls and muses on departed beauty Linda Loring. 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. 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. "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. 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".īut Banville lets us know from the very start of The Black-Eyed Blonde that we are in the safest of hands here. A s 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. ![]()
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