The Black-Eyed Blonde

Raymond Chandler is one of the most copied authors in history. Ergo, he's one of the most badly copied authors in history. Every novel that has a cynical but ethical private eye being hired by rich beautiful women to prowl the streets of L.A. (or San Francisco, or New York, or even London) can be traced back to Chandler.

Authors have copied him subconsciously, completely openly but illegally (just change the name Philip Marlowe to something else) and now even with approval. Raymond Parker wrote one many years back, and now John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, has gotten the right to use the character of Philip Marlowe, Chandler's greatest creation.

It's not a failure, but I think Black would admit that it's not Chandler. Consider the opening line: "It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it's being watched." What, exactly, does that mean? I wasn't optimistic after that opening, but it does get better.

Black, to his credit, does not play fast and loose with Marlowe. He doesn't have him go into a time machine to the days of Shakespeare, or as an astronaut on the moon. He's a gumshoe in L.A. in the 1950s, and he's hired by a beautiful perfume heiress to track down an ex-lover of hers that she thought was dead, until she saw him walking down the street in San Francisco.

As with any Marlowe book, it's not that simple. Soon Marlowe is being threatened by a pair of Mexican goons, gets a Mickey Finn ("It wasn't the first time in my life I'd been slipped a Mickey Finn, and it probably won't be the last"), gets trussed up and nearly drowned in a swimming pool, and, of course falls head over heels with his client, even though he's pretty sure she's using him. "I was still in love with her, in some sort of painful, hopeless way. What a chump I was."

The world of Marlowe is intact. There's Bernie Ohls, from the sheriff's office, who is Marlowe's friend/enemy. A character from Chandler's The Long Goodbye shows up (I haven't read that, but it tickled my memory bank because of the Robert Altman film). Black even uses Chandler's advice: if you're stuck, just have a man come through the door with a gun.

At least Black doesn't leave any loose ends--all murders are solved. And Black keeps trying in the simile contest: "Around here there are days in high summer when the sun works on you like a gorilla peeling a banana." And there's the commentary on the absurdity around him: "I can't decide which are worse, bars that pretend to be Irish, with their plastic shamrocks and shillelaghs, or Cockneyfied joints like the Bull." Or the almost fetishistic descriptions of appearance: "He had a head the shape of a shoe box, sitting on three or four folds of fat in the place where there used to be a chin, and a flap of thick hair dyed the color of oiled teak was plastered sideways across his flat skull."

But, in the end, one can't help but go back to Chandler. Black writes Marlowe saying, after being beaten up, "Bad as I felt, it was better than being dead, but only just." That's not bad, but it pales when Chandler had Marlowe saying, in The Big Sleep, "I felt like an amputated leg."

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