Back to Blog
![]() ![]() She is sitting picturesquely in her big conservatory, a feature of perhaps the other most famous noir thriller of the 1940s, The Big Sleep. The iced tea the love interest is drinking is straight out of Double Indemnity (a film later referenced by Marlowe as he speaks, inevitably, to a young would-be starlet). I wonder whether there’s such a thing as trope-crawling, because that’s what Banville seems to be doing here. When his (fairly perfunctory) first investigations come to nothing he pays a visit to her seafront mansion and, after she’s told him more of the story, they end up kissing. She is Clare Cavendish, daughter of a woman who has made a fortune in the perfume business, and he is fascinated by her. ![]() We get the classic opening scene as the good-looking dame visits Marlowe’s office with a mysterious job for him. So far the plot is thin, and I’m practically half-way through already. I’m spending as much time speculating on what that something might be as on the latest twist in the plot. But I imagine that Banville, a serious literary novelist, must have something more than imitation on his mind. ![]() Not plausible as in I believe any of it, but in terms of holding up as a Raymond Chandler pastiche. A Philip Marlowe novel written by John Banville? Can it ever be any more than a pastiche, like those James Bonds that people are writing now, or the new sequel to the Stieg Larsson The Girl With… franchise? I don’t know yet. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |