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Crime fiction fans – especially Americans – have had a longstanding love affair with hard-boiled tales, and small wonder: emerging in the period between the two World Wars, these stories replaced the mannered, elegant and altogether unrealistic drawing-room mysteries made famous by the likes of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and other purveyors of what has come to be called the Golden Age of Crime Fiction. The gritty realism of writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and James M. Cain drew on life in the mean streets, and if the wealthy were involved, it was more likely than not that they were the villains, rather than innocent bystanders who were embarrassed by discovering a body in their otherwise-pristine library. The new style resonated among ex-soldiers who had seen violence at first hand, and those who lived in shabby tenements at some remove from the country houses of the well-to-do and socially elite.
It is hardly surprising, then, that even accomplished and award-winning British authors should turn to hard-boiled fiction with the goal of emulating some of the most successful and most highly regarded writers of the genre. Among those, novelist John Banville, winner of the Man Booker Prize, well known for crime fiction penned under the name of Benjamin Black, has recently come forth with his own take on the shadowy world of the City of Angels in the 1940s, and chosen as his protagonist none other than that icon of American hard-boiled crime tales, Philip Marlowe.
The plot of THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE is straightforward, and familiar to fans of hard-boiled tales: a ravishingly beautiful, wealthy and married young woman named Clare Cavendish calls on gumshoe Philip Marlowe to ask his help in finding her lover, a womanizer and petty schemer named Nico Peterson. Although it's been two months since he disappeared, it seems she's just getting around to looking for him. Remember this is LA, where people tend to be blasé about life's vicissitudes. It's not long before Marlowe has some information for her, and it's not good. A police detective (PIs always seem to have friends in the force) reports that Peterson had been killed in a hit-and-run. When his client admits she knew this, Marlowe asks, not unreasonably, why she hired him. She replies that she saw Peterson alive just the other day, in San Francisco.
Thus begins Marlowe's foray into the rarified world of the wealthy, replete with dissolute wastrels and exclusive private clubs, and mysterious high-flyers who pick a gumshoe up off the streets in expensive limousines in order to make him an offer he really shouldn't refuse. Before the saga has ended our erstwhile snoop will – you guessed it – be stonewalled by bartenders, worked over by thugs from both ends of the social spectrum, suspected by the police of having a hand in various disappearances and deaths, and have to fight his way out of very sticky situations; and as Marlowe himself observes, when you're past forty, you're past fighting. As in most hard-boiled novels, the femme fatale disappears for much of the tale, reappearing occasionally (and just long enough) to dress Marlowe's wounds and to hop in the sack with him – also de rigueur in the genre.
Perhaps the biggest question facing the reader is whether THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE is intended as homage or parody. Even if a writer's intentions are pure, it's easy to slip over the edge. Occasionally Black seems a bit heavy-handed, or perhaps he's merely being tongue-in-cheek. Consider, for example, the following passage, in which Marlowe questions his client:
“Did you go to the police?”
Her eyes widened. “The police?” she said, and I thought she might laugh. “That wouldn't have done at all. Nico was rather shy of the police, and he would not have thanked me for putting them onto him.”
“Shy in what way?” I asked. “Did he have things to hide?”
“Haven't we all, Mr. Marlowe?” Again she dilated those lovely lids.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On many things.”
This was going nowhere, in ever-increasing circles...I nodded—sagely, I hoped—then took up my pipe and did some business with it, tamping the dottle, and so on. A tobacco pipe is a very handy prop, when you want to seem thoughtful and wise.
I leave it to the reader to make the call.
Black did a more-than-passable job in turning out a hard-boiled, but then he had someone of exceptional talent to show him the way. It would be churlish – as well as obvious – to say THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE is derivative. It is a stylish treatment in the spirit of Chandler's original tales, with only a few false notes, but they are there. Having been born in the City of Angels in the early forties, and having spent the next two decades growing up in the post-war culture of California, I can say with some assurance that Mexicans were sometime referred to as Mexicanos, or more pejoratively as wetbacks, or even greasers; they were not, however, referred to as Mexes, as Black alleges. Moreover, characters in the 40s-set tale are unlikely to have taken an Air Canada flight, as it was known as Trans-Canada Airlines until 1964.
Such cavils aside, THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE is a good yarn, better than most of its kind, and, I suspect, one that Chandler would have enjoyed reading.
§ Since 2005 Jim Napier's reviews and interviews have appeared in several Canadian newspapers and on such various crime fiction and literary websites, including his own award-winning site, Deadly Diversions. He can be reached at jnapier@deadlydiversions.com
Reviewed by Jim Napier, March 2014
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