Ladies in flowered frocks with murder in their hearts, you know? Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham. And the discovery of Chandler was wonderful! Because before then I had read mostly the English crime novelists. He came to me about three years ago and said “Why don’t you do a Philip Marlowe novel?” I’d read Chandler since I was in my early teens. JB: Well, it’s boringly simple, because my agent Ed Victor is also the agent for the Raymond Chandler estate. As businessmen came and went from the tables around us, Banville and I talked about Quirke, Marlowe, Los Angeles, and the stylish prose of dishwasher instruction manuals.ĬC: How did this book get off the ground? Did you approach the Chandler estate or did they approach you? Although one suspects that Banville’s prizewinning work written under his own name - novels like The Book of Evidence, The Sea, and Ancient Light - played a part in his getting permission to take over from Chandler, the new book is credited to Benjamin Black, Banville’s alter ego, who has written a series of crime novels featuring a pathologist in the Dublin morgue named Quirke. We both ordered coffees and began to talk about the narrator in question: Philip Marlowe.īanville is the second writer, after Robert B. Parker, to get permission from the Raymond Chandler estate to write a Marlowe novel. In his new novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde ( Henry Holt), he has the narrator grouse about the phony Irish pubs of Los Angeles, but this hotel restaurant seemed sufficiently like a hotel restaurant in London to escape Banville’s condemnation.

When John Banville came to New York earlier this month, I met him for breakfast at the London Hotel.

The black eyed blonde