read by Dennis Boutsikaris
It is a fine and difficult line to tread between homage and parody
when attempting the genre of the American private eye. Robert B. Parker has
famously been here before Benjamin Black, first finishing Raymond Chandler’s
final Philip Marlowe novel Poodle Springs
and then writing Perchance to Dream,
which takes off where The Big Sleep
ends. Parker has his detractors, although both books succeed in large measure,
but Benjamin Black [Man Booker
Prize-winning John Banville] has had almost unanimous praise for The Black
Eyed Blonde, which it is to be hoped will send the reader back to the wonderful prose Chandler
created and sustained.
The plot is sharp, the characters well drawn, and the prose
is full of wit and grace. It certainly starts promisingly:
‘I watched a woman at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood,
waiting for the light to change. Long legs, a slim cream jacket with high
shoulders, navy blue pencil skirt. She wore a hat, too, a skimpy affair that
made it seem as if a small bird had alighted on the side of her hair and
settled there happily. She looked left and right and left again – she must have
been so good when she was a little girl.’
The observations, the simile, the implication that the
long-legged woman might not be quite so ‘good’ as when she was a little girl,
are all highly suggestive of Chandler’s style. And for the most part Black
maintains this throughout, although some of the prose does sound a little self-conscious,
and there are times when Black’s Marlowe thinks in ways Chandler’s Marlowe
never would (‘I stand at this window a lot, contemplating the world and its
ways’). There are also far too many references to characters and situations in
the Marlowe canon, like the numerous instances where gimlets are the drink of
choice, just so that we know that Black has done his homework.
But the above does not detract from the tremendous pleasure
that The Black Eyed Blonde provides. And
it deserves more than a single listen or read. Ersatz Chandler is better than
no Chandler at all, and there are very few who could do it as well as Black. Moreover,
Dennis Boutsikaris is outstanding – and Chandler is so much better in American.
* * * *
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