the black eyed blonde a philip marlowe novel

But features in a novel written in the 1940s or 50s that might be taken as a given, like a male narrator’s response to an attractive woman, have to be seen differently in the 21st Century.

Half-way through the novel I still don’t know the answer to that one. Is it just that Banville isn’t seeking anything new, or that he’s expecting his reader to notice that he is, perhaps deliberately, offering only tried and tested formulas?

If the dame’s visit to the office proceeds exactly according to the rules, so does Marlowe’s reaction. Right from the start, as his narrator describes the good-looking woman just as the Marlowe of the 1940s and 50s would do it, I was wondering about established gender roles. Even if he’s only looking for a holiday, he’s bound to be holding up the genre to some kind of scrutiny. If a serious literary novelist – I must stop using that phrase – decides to spend time in the safe waters of a highly familiar genre, he’s either simply taking a break from the serious business of his usual work or he’s doing it to see what light his hip modern sensibility can bring to a detective caper apparently from the first half of last century. I’ll get back to the plot later, because by this time something else seemed to be more interesting. This is in Chapter 4, and that’s when I decided to give up on spotting the references. She is sitting picturesquely in her big conservatory, a feature of perhaps the other most famous noir thriller of the 1940s, The Big Sleep. The iced tea the love interest is drinking is straight out of Double Indemnity (a film later referenced by Marlowe as he speaks, inevitably, to a young would-be starlet). I wonder whether there’s such a thing as trope-crawling, because that’s what Banville seems to be doing here. When his (fairly perfunctory) first investigations come to nothing he pays a visit to her seafront mansion and, after she’s told him more of the story, they end up kissing. She is Clare Cavendish, daughter of a woman who has made a fortune in the perfume business, and he is fascinated by her. We get the classic opening scene as the good-looking dame visits Marlowe’s office with a mysterious job for him. So far the plot is thin, and I’m practically half-way through already. I’m spending as much time speculating on what that something might be as on the latest twist in the plot. But I imagine that Banville, a serious literary novelist, must have something more than imitation on his mind. Not plausible as in I believe any of it, but in terms of holding up as a Raymond Chandler pastiche. A Philip Marlowe novel written by John Banville? Can it ever be any more than a pastiche, like those James Bonds that people are writing now, or the new sequel to the Stieg Larsson The Girl With… franchise? I don’t know yet.

The black eyed blonde a philip marlowe novel