Sunday, April 20, 2014

No Big Sleep for Raymond Chandler

No Big Sleep for Raymond Chandler

No Big Sleep for Raymond Chandler by Dick Lochte

April 19th, 2014 - Los Angeles Review of Books

EARLY IN MARCH, I attended one of the Writers Bloc interview sessions that Andrea Grossman presents regularly in Los Angeles, this one featuring Dublin author John Banville. He was touring from his native emerald isle, not on behalf of his prize-winning “literary” works, but on a crime novel that carries his genre nom de plume, Benjamin Black. Usually the Black books feature a depressed, alcoholic coroner named Quirk, staggering through murders and father-daughter confrontations in post–World War II Dublin. 

His new thriller, The Black-Eyed Blonde, the subject of that night’s program, is something a bit different — an addition to Raymond Chandler’s adventures of iconic private detective Philip Marlowe, set in Los Angeles at a time after the late author’s last great novel The Long Goodbye (1953) and before his, well, less than great Playback (1958).

Sipping occasionally from a cocktail, Banville responded to questions mainly about the writing of the new novel with an air of dry amusement. Yes, he realized he was walking on sacred ground, but he felt he could do justice to the character created by Chandler. No, he did not think it necessary to spend too much time researching Los Angeles in the 1950s, though he did ask friends familiar with the city to vet his manuscript.

As for how he came to the project: it was at the suggestion of his literary agent, Ed Victor, also the agent for the Chandler estate. For some time, Victor and the estate, controlled primarily by Graham C. Greene, nephew of the late novelist Graham Greene, have been actively attempting to keep the flame alive. There have been numerous news items about Philip Marlowe movies and television series that have never quite made it to screens large or small, although one was evidently filmed, judging by a sample available on YouTube. And, a few years ago, there was a report that a British novelist was working on a book featuring “the young Philip Marlowe.”

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