{"id":12989,"date":"2015-09-19T00:01:44","date_gmt":"2015-09-19T06:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=12989"},"modified":"2015-09-19T21:32:03","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T03:32:03","slug":"book-review-black-eyed-blonde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/book-review-black-eyed-blonde\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Black Eyed Blonde"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;OneJS=1&amp;Operation=GetAdHtml&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;source=ss&amp;ref=ss_til&amp;ad_type=product_link&amp;tracking_id=adamsblog03-20&amp;marketplace=amazon&amp;region=US&amp;placement=1250062128&amp;asins=1250062128&amp;linkId=XI4L5CAE4KUTZUJ3&amp;show_border=true&amp;link_opens_in_new_window=true\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In <em>Black-Eyed Blonde, <\/em>mystery writer John Banville writing under the pen name of Benjamin Black takes on the task of writing a new Philip Marlowe novel more than a half century after the passing of Marlowe&#8217;s legendary creator Raymond Chandler.<\/p>\n<p>The plot is a well-done but typical hard-boiled story line. A strikingly beautiful woman walks into Marlowe&#8217;s office and hires him to find her\u00a0boyfriend. \u00a0Marlowe finds out the boyfriend was killed, but the woman claims to have seen him in San Francisco after that.<\/p>\n<p>Banville doesn&#8217;t come close to matching Chandler&#8217;s powerful prose and snappy dialogue. In many ways, while this Marlowe isn&#8217;t a pushover, he&#8217;s far more polite and measured than Chandler&#8217;s Marlowe ever was, certainly far softer than he was in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/book-review-long-goodbye\/\">The Long Goodbye<\/a> <\/em>which this book is set after. To be fair, I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s entirely a bad point, given Marlowe was almost over the top in that.<\/p>\n<p>However, what Banville does get right are the Chandleresque characters, these sort of quirky and engaging side characters that hold not only Marlowe&#8217;s attention but ours. The plot is a \u00a0solid and engaging piece of classic hard-boiled detective fiction until the last couple chapters,\u00a0 which isn&#8217;t common in pastiches. I&#8217;ve read some of Robert Goldsborough&#8217;s Nero Wolfe novels and spent most of the books unable to get into the unsubstantial plots and have stewed over how unlike Nero Wolfe the story is.\u00a0 In <em>Black-Eyed Blonde, <\/em>there were a couple minutes where I thought, &#8220;This isn&#8217;t really Philip Marlowe but whatever it is, it&#8217;s very good.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>However, the ending was a bit of a letdown. Without going into details, the book becomes, in many ways, a sequel to <em>The Long Goodbye.\u00a0 <\/em>There&#8217;s no need for a sequel to <em>The Long\u00a0 Goodbye, <\/em>and the ending of this book doesn&#8217;t add luster to that classic tale.<em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Too often pastiche writers assume we want sequels and follow ups to previous stories. With Marlowe, what I want are new standalone mysteries that measure up to what&#8217;s come before.\u00a0 Unlike Nero Wolfe, Marlowe was never a character whose existence depended on a regular cast or continuity.\u00a0 And to be fair, this element \u00a0only looms in the end of the book. Still, I would have preferred a conclusion that made the book standalone rather than on the shoulder&#8217;s of a predecessor.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, if you like classic hard-boiled novels, you&#8217;ll enjoy this book provided you&#8217;re not turned off by it&#8217;s attempt to make itself a sequel to\u00a0one of the most beloved hard-boiled novels.<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 3.5 out of 5.0<\/p>\n<p><em>If you enjoyed this post, you can have new posts about Detective stories and the golden age of radio and television delivered\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B004U8SET2\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=adamsblog03-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B004U8SET2\">automatically to your Kindle<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>This post contains affiliate links, which means that items purchased from these links may result in a commission being paid to the author of this post at no extra cost to the purchase<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"cat_tags clear\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Black-Eyed Blonde, mystery writer John Banville writing under the pen name of Benjamin Black takes on the task of writing a new Philip Marlowe novel more than a half century after the passing of Marlowe&#8217;s legendary creator Raymond Chandler. The plot is a well-done but typical hard-boiled story line. A strikingly beautiful woman walks&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[63,123,272],"tags":[533],"class_list":["post-12989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-golden-age-article","category-philip-marlowe","tag-mixed-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-3nv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12989"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13041,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12989\/revisions\/13041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}