5/20/2023 0 Comments The black eyed blonde![]() Banville is noted for his superb use of language, and here he puts that to use so well that I couldn’t find a single jarring note. Benjamin Black – who is, of course, the Booker prizewinner John Banville – has succeeded astonishingly well, so much so that I almost had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t reading a newly discovered Chandler. I’m a great admirer of Raymond Chandler and started this novel with some trepidation – so many writers of hard-boiled detective fiction have tried to follow in his footsteps, but none has really matched up, for me at least. ![]() I’d just about decided to call a halt to my own reading of them when this came my way and oh how glad I am that it did. Dead writers are being revived at an alarming rate these days, some more successfully than others. ![]() This is Philip Marlowe in typically self-reflexive mode, here towards the end of Benjamin Black’s extraordinary piece of literary ventriloquism. ![]()
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