AudioBooksReview: Raymond Chandler

read by Dennis Boutsikaris

It is a fine and difficult line to tread between homage and parody when attempting the genre of the American private eye. Robert B. Parker has famously been here before Benjamin Black, first finishing Raymond Chandler’s final Philip Marlowe novel Poodle Springs and then writing Perchance to Dream, which takes off where The Big Sleep ends. Parker has his detractors, although both books succeed in large measure, but Benjamin Black [Man Booker Prize-winning John Banville] has had almost unanimous praise for The Black Eyed Blonde, which it is to be hoped will send the reader back to the wonderful prose Chandler created and sustained.

The plot is sharp, the characters well drawn, and the prose is full of wit and grace. It certainly starts promisingly:

‘I watched a woman at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood, waiting for the light to change. Long legs, a slim cream jacket with high shoulders, navy blue pencil skirt. She wore a hat, too, a skimpy affair that made it seem as if a small bird had alighted on the side of her hair and settled there happily. She looked left and right and left again – she must have been so good when she was a little girl.’

The observations, the simile, the implication that the long-legged woman might not be quite so ‘good’ as when she was a little girl, are all highly suggestive of Chandler’s style. And for the most part Black maintains this throughout, although some of the prose does sound a little self-conscious, and there are times when Black’s Marlowe thinks in ways Chandler’s Marlowe never would (‘I stand at this window a lot, contemplating the world and its ways’). There are also far too many references to characters and situations in the Marlowe canon, like the numerous instances where gimlets are the drink of choice, just so that we know that Black has done his homework.

But the above does not detract from the tremendous pleasure that The Black Eyed Blonde provides. And it deserves more than a single listen or read. Ersatz Chandler is better than no Chandler at all, and there are very few who could do it as well as Black. Moreover, Dennis Boutsikaris is outstanding – and Chandler is so much better in American.

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Buy The Black Eyed Blonde

read by Sean Barrett

Lennox, Craig Russell’s Canadian-Scottish private investigator, clearly owes a great deal to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The title of the third Lennox novel, The Deep Dark Sleep would certainly seem to confirm the Chandleresque homage. Marlowe and Lennox share a dry, witty reflectiveness on their respective stomping grounds (Glasgow and Los Angeles). Both detectives have an uneasy relationship with their respective police forces and tangle with the gangsters of their particular era and locale. Both appear to maintain a code of honour quite unexpected amongst the hard-bitten, cynical characters who populate their driven, thoughtful crime novels.

In Dead Men and BrokenHearts Lennox has been hired to work on two new cases: one by a woman who thinks her husband is being unfaithful, the other investigating the disappearance of a union official and a large amount of cash. Against the political backdrop of Suez and the Hungarian uprising, there is an abundance of period detail that makes the whole thing brim with verisimilitude. Everything seems to revolve around ‘Tanglewood’ – the name overheard by the suspicious wife who sets Lennox off on his goose chase at the opening of the book. But is it a surname, a business, a town? Before the dramatic and enthralling climax, Lennox is forced to go on the run, fugitive from the Glasgow Constabulary, aided and protected by Twinkletoes, the heavy from the very first Lennox novel and whose speciality is extracting information from unfortunates by clipping off their toes with a bolt cutter. The ubiquitous smog, mystifying mistaken identities, elusive Secret Service personnel, shadowy and sadistic European politics and morally redundant post-war malaise all inhabit this entertaining and intriguing narrative, superbly brought to life by the incomparable Sean Barrett.

In this, the fourth in the Lennox series of novels, the investigator seriously plans a new life back in his native Canada where he can put everything behind him – removing himself from the ‘dead men and broken hearts’ that is said in the book to sum up Lennox’s life past and present. I, for one, hope he changes his mind.

This series is a great find. Spread the word: you will definitely fall under the Lennox spell.

Superb.

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Buy Dead Men and BrokenHearts

The Black Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black

Dead Men and Broken Hearts by Craig Russell