'This was the kind of philosophical speculation I was prone to, hence my reputation as the thinking man's detective.' Women are 'nothing but trouble, whatever you say, whatever you do', a brunette wears 'an unignorably tight sweater', and Marlowe sits in bars, pondering why the first sip of beer is always so much better than the second. We are squarely back in Marlowe's Bay City here, more than 50 years after Chandler himself last visited, as our detective paces the floors in Yucca Avenue, 'a rented house where about the only things I could call my own were my trusty coffeepot and a chess set of faded ivory', and knocks back the booze, medicinal and otherwise. 'Death be not proud, said the poet, but I don't see why the Reaper shouldn't feel a certain sense of accomplishment, given the thoroughness of his work and his unchallenged record of successes,' the private eye tells us, lugubriously. There's a pair of unscrupulous Mexicans, torture and murder, a visit to a movie set and a fantastic scene in a country club's swimming pool complete with guns, henchmen, and the far-too-infrequently used insult of 'milksop' (which makes Marlowe laugh). 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.

The black eyed blonde by benjamin black