promotional tour, but we caught up to him via email:Įd Siegel: The photos that accompany the John Banville books and the Benjamin Black books look like two different people. Black may be channeling Chandler, but Banville is there, lurking, like the gods in “The Infinities.”īanville didn’t make it to Boston during his U.S. The rest is pure Marlowe, but you get the idea. There was something about the feeling of the sun on the back of my neck that made me uneasy …”
What I didn’t much care for was being out in it, unprotected. I even liked looking at it, sometimes, from the highway, say, through a car windshield. I mean I liked the thought of it being there: the trees, the grass, birds in the bushes, all that. Here’s a passage that could have been uttered by one of Banville’s disaffected anti-heroes or by the macho Marlowe: At the same time, the writing is perfectly Black-humored – more arch than Chandler’s, as if acknowledging this isn’t really the way the world works even as he seduces us into thinking that it is. On the one hand, it’s easy to imagine Humphrey Bogart wise-cracking his way past the moneyed classes he has to do battle with here (though thanks to the Motion Picture Code I never pictured Bogie actually in motion with a woman until now). It does full justice to both Chandler and Black. And here’s perhaps the greatest contrast, or surprise, of them all. (Photo by Douglas Banville)Ĭertainly by my account. (I gave up on it.) Black’s contribution, “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” by most accounts, is. The late Robert Parker, who finished a previous Marlowe book, “Poodle Springs,” was closer to Raymond Chandler’s sensibilities than Black, though the book by many accounts was not a success. He wasn’t the most likely crime writer, then, to be selected to write the latest Philip Marlowe novel. The Quirke crime novels written under the name Benjamin Black resolve who done it, but there’s a lingering question of how much others, beyond the reach of Irish law in the 1950s, have gotten away with. His novels often have an air of the supernatural in them but are thoroughly grounded in reality. The contrasts in John Banville’s writing are ever intriguing. Humphrey Bogart in "The Big Sleep." (Warner Brothers/YouTube) This article is more than 9 years old.
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