Review: The Black-Eyed Blonde

The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black (Mantle, £16.99)

It’s 60 years since Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye was first published. That’s a long time to wait for a sequel. Chandler died in 1959 but Benjamin Black, author of the Quirke series of crime novels set in Dublin in the Fifties — aka Man Booker Prize-winning John Banville — reveals a knack for channelling the grand master of noir.

Clare Cavendish, the eponymous femme fatale, has black irises — it’s Philip Marlowe, the PI she hires, who ends up with bruises. The heiress to the Irish Langrishe perfume fortune wants him to find a friend, Nico Peterson, a Hollywood hustler declared dead but seen in San Francisco. Marlowe smells a rat.

Black ticks all the boxes — a man with a gun in his hand comes through the door more than once — and the set-pieces, which include an interview with a starlet on a back-lot and a visit to a creepy, swanky country club staffed by oddballs, are magnificent.

However, Black seems determined not to let the reader forget that this is a pastiche. The theatricality of it all is a leitmotif: “The room had the look of a stage set”; “the events of the past half-minute or so, seen from a certain angle, would have looked as comical, and as grotesque, as a Charlie Chaplin routine.” It’s as if he’s deliberately flirting with parody.

The Fifties LA depicted here — “a lonely town”, “a scary place” — has a lot more personality than a paper cup: “Los Angeles has its moments, if you’re rich and privileged enough to be in the places where they happen.”

That’s the social comment box ticked. The profusion of flora — bougainvillea, gardenia, honeysuckle and jacaranda — is lovingly described and chimes with the theme of scents and sensibility.

As for Marlowe himself, the borderline alcoholic is older but none the wiser. His mouth is still smart and his heart still breaks. He was, and is, the reason why even sham-Chandler should be read: “There are days in high summer when the sun works on you like a gorilla peeling a banana.”

He makes you wince and laugh out loud. What better name for a peacock is there than Liberace? More, please.