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The Philip Marlowe novels were my gateway drug to the stark, unberstated and beautiful world of hardboiled literature. That doesn't make me very special since Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are the forefathers of the genre and influenced generations of tough guy writing. My tastes since then developped sideways from Marlowe, but he'll always be the original outsider with a blooming, effervescent inner self, to me. I consider the concept of sequels to be dangerous in general. Some great things are better left untouched and reappreciated over the years, rather than to be reopened and transformed into something else. Benjamin Black, the hardboiled alter ego of author John Banville, wrote a new installment in the Philip Marlowe series titled THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE. Is this bold project a success or a disgrace to Raymond Chandler's legacy? Nothing is absolute, guys. The answer lies somewhere in between these two statements.
Marlowe is sitting at his office, like always, when he observes a beautiful, blonde woman crossing the street. She is in fact walking into his own building, to consult with him about the disappearance of her lover, a man named Nico Peterson. The case sounds all kinds of wrong to Marlowe right off the bat, yet he cannot either refuse the work or say no to such a beautiful woman. What would a beautiful, educated and filthy rich woman do with a two-bits hustler like Peterson? Seems like there was a lot going on with the guy, including getting chased by Mexican hitmen, faking his own demise and getting entangled in the business of a private club. Just another day at the office for Marlowe, really.
How am I supposed to review a freakin' new Philip Marlowe novel? What should my criteria be: by how well it integrates itself in the character's cannon, by literary merit alone or both? I don't know. What I know is that THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE is interesting for quite a bit. Benjamin Black's Marlowe is not really Marlowe, so he has an intentity of his own without straying too far away from the original content. Black's Marlowe is...more sensitve, I should say. He's not exactly a sweetheart, but he's a little more romantic than the original and has thoughts about his own vulnerability and loneliness that Chandler's Marlowe would've never had. That was an interesting decision since anything closer to the character would've been mimetism. Maybe some will consider Black's Marlowe to be a sacrilege, but I'm happy he was different from the original. What would've been the interest otherwise?
It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it’s being watched. Cars trickled past in the street below the dusty window of my office, and a few of the good folks of our fair city ambled along the sidewalk, men in hats, mostly, going nowhere.
How does it tie-in to the original Marlowe universe, then? Well, for the most part. For about 200 pages, the allusions to Chandler's work remains carefully controlled: old characters show their faces (including personal favourite of mine Bernie Ohls), old cases are mentioned, it remains fun and anecdotal and most important, THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE concentrates on the case at hand. I'm going to do a ''spoilery'' thing here, without actually spoiling the novel, but I believe it's important for any Marlowe fan to know this before diving into THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE : it commits a cardinal sin and messes with the integrity of Raymond Chandler's work. That is a HUGE don't and it killed the fun almost instantly for me. The beautiful thing about mystery series is that books can be independant from one another, but THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE got way too intimate with Chandler's work and invalidated its existence to me.
So who is THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE for? Casual fans of Philip Marlowe novels, I suppose. The novel started with one strike against it with the hardboiled crowd and pop-flied in the last hundred pages, to pursue the baseball metaphor. It's a well-written novel, feating an interestingly anchronistic Marlowe and for most part writes the guideline to how an iconic series should be pursued by different authors, but not messing with the original material overrides all this, unfortunately. THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE does it in a reckless, disrespectful way that will make you foam at the mouth. So this is not a novel for the most loyal Marlowe fans. It could've been the boldest, most refreshing spin off the iconic anti-hero, but it eventually take a wrong turn and becomes fan-fiction gone wrong after a couple bad decisions. The key here is to not take it too seriously, I think. Most important, don't take it as a bona fide Philip Marlowe novel.