![]() ![]() Long legs, a slim cream jacket with high shoulders, navy blue pencil skirt. I watched a woman at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood, waiting for the light to change. Cars trickled past in the street below the dusty window of my office, and a few of the good folks of our fair city ambled along the sidewalk, men in hats, mostly, going nowhere. ![]() The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it’s being watched. It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. Hovering over the conversation, too, is always the specter of Raymond Chandler, whom Black has mimicked marvelously as Marlowe reflects on another lean season in the early 1950s. Black is the one who writes books fast to be read fast, most notably the six black-hearted noir novels starring Irish pathologist Quirke. ![]() An audience with crime novelist Benjamin Black has a bit of the air of a meeting with a mental health professional about multiple personality disorder, especially given that we’re here to discuss his latest novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde, commissioned by the estate of the late Raymond Chandler to continue the adventures of private eye Philip Marlowe.īlack, of course, is the shadowy pseudonym of Man Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist John Banville, who slaves over his literary novels like he’s pressing coal into diamonds. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |