Then a new client arrives: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, Clare Cavendish wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson. In Los Angeles, Private Detective Philip Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Clare? The rest would be easy to put out of my mind, but not the black-eyed blonde. I hope we see some more Philip Marlowe novels from Benjamin Black.Maybe it was time I forgot about Nico Peterson, and his sister, and the Cahuilla Club, and Clare Cavendish. We can’t visit the time when Marlowe walked the mean Streets or even those Streets themselves as they were then but they seem real in our imagination as we turn the pages, both in Chandler’s originals and in Black’s, Black Eyed Blond. That is until I read The Black Eyed Blond Benjamin Black’s Marlowe is a damn good likeness to Chandler’s, even when stood next to him in the bright California sun. I have read one or two Marlowe books by other authors I can’t say that any I had read were anywhere near as good as Chandler’s originals. Parker and I are not the only people who think there is more in the tank where Marlowe is concerned. Poodle Springs was partly written when Chandler died, it was finished by Robert B Parker, his completion of Poodle Springs is seamless Parker wrote some other Marlowe Novels I haven’t read any these yet but they are on my “To Be Read” list. Since then, Marlowe has lurked in my subconscious.Ĭhandler’s style is something I admire the one line descriptions are brilliant, the plots are tangled and interesting Philip Marlowe is always in the thick of the action, there is usually a fascinating woman involved, often a femme fatale. I don’t know if my first encounter with Marlowe was in a book, watching Humphrey Bogart play him in the Big Sleep on the silver screen or Chandler’s books dramatised on Radio 4, with Ed Bishop as Marlowe. Will he find this man, and what is this man’s connection to the woman looking for him? It is an intriguing story seeing Marlowe tangling with the rich, famous and the criminal underworld of Los Angeles, some of the characters fall into more than one category, some of them into all three.Īs long as I can remember I have been a fan of Raymond Chandler and his hero Philip Marlowe.

The blond, Mrs Clare Cavendish, daughter of a fabulously rich perfume maker, hires him to find a missing man, a man who is not her husband. A beautiful, black eyed, blond woman walks into Philip Marlowe’s office and into his life.

The black eyed blond