Black On Blonde: Hot Press meets John Banville

John Banville breezes into the bar of Dublin’s Morrison Hotel a couple of minutes late for our midday appointment. Ireland’s most eminent prose stylist is also sartorially dapper. It’s swelteringly hot outside, but the 68-year-old Booker-winner is clad head to toe in black, a blood-red handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket the only splash of color.

He apologises for his tardiness, places his hat on the table and orders a glass of Sauvignon. Although friendly, he looks tired and initially seems slightly discombobulated. Turns out that he’s been racking up the air miles.

“I’ve been all over the place,” he explains. “I feel I have been picked up and... whoosh! I was in France, then Spain, Spain to New York, New York to Washington, Washington to Los Angeles. Came back just the other day from Los Angeles. Got over my jet lag. Italy on Friday, England next week.”

It’s a book publicity tour that has had him passing through all of these international departure lounges. The book itself is also something of a departure. The eighth novel to be published under his Benjamin Black nom de plume, The Black-Eyed Blonde is his near flawless take on Raymond Chandler’s iconic detective Philip Marlowe.

“It was very simple, how it came about,” he explains. “My agent, Ed Victor, also represents the Chandler estate. He came to me about three years ago, and said, ‘Since you’re now also Benjamin Black, why don’t you write a Philip Marlowe novel?’ I don’t know why I hesitated to do it at the time. I can’t remember why. But last summer I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that’.”

From Kingsley Amis taking on Fleming’s Bond to Sebastian Faulks doing Wodehouse’s Jeeves, there’s a long, not always distinguished history of established authors writing authorised sequels featuring iconic literary characters. Even in his Benjamin Black guise, however, rewriting a 1950s American gumshoe novel – complete with the requisite goons, guns and gals - might seem a little lowbrow for Banville, a writer frequently touted as a potential Noble laureate.

Until, that is, you realise just how Banvillian a classic character like Philip Marlowe actually is: a dark, damaged loner, with a wry sense of humour and a penchant for dangerous women.

“I suppose he is,” Banville muses. “I’d never thought of that. He’s a very complicated character. I think, in a peculiar way, Marlowe is more complicated than Chandler realised. Or at least was willing to acknowledge. It’s funny, when I read back over the books, how you can see Chandler every now and then thinking, ‘Hang on, this is a crime novel, I better do something here’, so he makes Marlowe break out in some brutal outburst or some violence. I don’t believe that’s Marlowe. Marlowe is a sensitive soul. He’s tough, but he’s not hard. He’s very soft. Which is what I like about him.

“I mean, for me, the essence of Marlowe is his loneliness, his solitude,” he continues. “He has no family, no friends, not that he ever talks about. He has a beer every now and then with some awful policeman. All the women he falls in love with betray him. His one friend, Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye, wasn’t much of a friend.

“Actually, a friend of mine, an Argentinian novelist, he insists that the only person Marlowe ever loved was Terry Lennox. I think it’s true. Marlowe’s sexuality is a bit iffy, I find.”

He laughs suddenly. “But then, whose isn’t?”

When he writes literary novels under his own name, Banville famously uses an antique fountain pen. As the more commercial Benjamin Black,
he types directly onto the screen. But how did he write as Chandler?

“The funny thing is I can’t remember writing the book,” he admits. “I almost have no memory of it. I don’t know why, maybe because I was writing it in someone else’s voice.”

He produced the novel in just three months.

“Oh, I do all my Benjamin Black books in about that,” he says, waving a hand. “I write them over the summer. I hate the summer, it’s my least favourite season. So I get rid of it by doing Black books. Before I started out, I had very grand plans to develop Marlowe and make him more contemporary and darker. Then I reread the original books, and I thought, ‘Why should I interfere with this? It’s perfect’. So I wrote it as if I were Chandler. I guess that’s why I can’t remember it. I wasn’t really there.”

Interestingly, it’s the first Benjamin Black novel to be written in the first person.

“Yeah, and it is so much easier,” he says. “Also, one of the things I find about writing crime fiction is that it’s very difficult to have any humour I don’t know why. But in the first person, you can do it. I mean, Chandler doesn’t provide belly laughs, but he is very witty. An elegant, dry wit.”

An occasional screenwriter, Banville has visited Los Angeles on many occasions and is intimately familiar with the City of Lost Angels. However, he has played fast and loose with the topography of Southern California in the novel.

“As Chandler did, I did a mixture of the factual and the invented. I mean, Chandler changed Santa Monica into ‘Bay City’. No-one knows why. Actually, I heard one theory in America, which is possible, that he was afraid of the police in Santa Monica. Because all of the corrupt policemen in his books come from Bay City. Maybe he was scared that they would come and get him. It’s a good theory.”

Fast-paced, sexy, violent and cleverly plotted, The Black-Eyed Blonde seems ripe for a film adaptation. Although familiar with the old Marlowe movies, they didn’t form part of Banville’s research.

“I’ve never really seen Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe,” he says. “Chandler wanted Cary Grant as Marlowe. I could see someone like Liam Neeson as Marlowe. In the book The Long Goodbye, when Marlowe first appears, a girl says to him, ‘You’re very tall, aren’t you?’ But in the movie, she says, ‘You’re not very tall, are you?’ They had to adapt it for Bogart.”

His eyes light up when I suggest that George Clooney would make a good Marlowe.

“He would be wonderful, wouldn’t he? I doubt he would do it, though. They would be taking on old stuff. And everything has to be new, new, new nowadays. And of course there would be the inevitable comparisons with Bogart, which nobody would want. But Clooney would be superb. I think that he and Neeson have that wonderful underlying quality of melancholy, which would be perfect for Marlowe.”

Will Benjamin Black write another Marlowe novel?

“I don’t know,” he says, doubtfully. “I’m not being evasive, I really don’t know. Sometimes I think I’d love to do another one. Then I think, ‘No, don’t push it, don’t push your luck’. Because I felt I did quite a good job with this. I’m proud of it. But would a second one show a strain? In which case, there would be no point in doing it. That’s the thing with books, they have to look like they were done with ease. But who knows?”

The Black-Eyed Blonde is published by Mantle.