Phillip Marlowe is on the way back to the big screen

Liam Neeson is to don a fedora and walk the mean streets for a new movie based on Chandler's writings - well, actually the forthcoming movie, Marlowe is actually based on the novel, The  Black-Eyed Blond written by Benjamin Black, the pen name of the Irish writer William John Banville. The highly praised book continues the adventures of Chandler's tarnished knight

"It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving." So begins a new novel featuring Philip Marlowe--yes, that Philip Marlowe. Channeling Raymond Chandler, Benjamin Black has brought Marlowe back to life for a new adventure on the mean streets of Bay City, California. It is the early 1950s, Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Then a new client is shown in: blond, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover. Almost immediately, Marlowe discovers that the man's disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events, and soon he is tangling with one of Bay City's richest--and most ruthless--families.

The book has received praise from none other than Stephen King who wrote, “Somewhere Raymond Chandler is smiling, because this is a beautifully rendered hardboiled novel that echoes Chandler's melancholy at perfect pitch. The story is great, but what amazed me is how John Banville caught the cumulative effect Chandler's prose had on readers. It's hard to quantify, but it's also what separated the Marlowe novels from the general run of noir (which included some damn fine novelists, like David Goodis and Jim Thompson). The sadness runs deep. I loved this book. It was like having an old friend, one you assumed was dead, walk into the room. Kind of like Terry Lennox, hiding behind those drapes.”

William Monahan, writer of The Departed, will be adapting Benjamin Black’s The Black-Eyed Blonde  for the screen.

Once more down those mean streets

Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe is to return in a novel written by John Banville to be published in 2013.  Mr. Banville, 66, is a Booker Prize-winning author who has also written several mysteries under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. The new Marlowe novel, which was authorized by Chandler’s estate, will be billed as a work by Mr. Black. The novel will be set in the 1940s in Chandler’s fictional town of Bay City, Calif.

"I love the challenge of following in the very large footsteps of Raymond Chandler.I began reading Chandler as a teenager, and frequently return to the novels.

"This idea has been germinating for several years and I relish the prospect of setting a book in Marlowe's California, which I always think of in terms of Edward Hopper's paintings. Bay City will have a slightly surreal, or hyper-real, atmosphere that I look forward to creating." John Banville


Image by aisu-kaminari

THE BIG SLEEP - Raymond Chandler

THE BIG SLEEP
ORIGINAL UK PUBLISHER HAMISH HAMILTON
March 1939
This facsimile edition 2009

It was about ten thirty in the evening, Late July, with the night overcast and the rain obscuring the hills of the valleys. I was wearing my striped jim jam bottoms, with a black T-shirt, Simpsons slippers and pastel blue boxers with little puppy dogs on them. I was scruffy, tired and didn't care who knew it. I was everything the lazy reader ought to be. I was going to read The Big Sleep for the first time. And before I knew it half the book had gone and the night was pushing towards a damp miserable dawn.

Firstly this isn't a review as such - how could it be? How could I offer anything constructive apropos to this widely acknowledged masterpiece? But even though I knew the story backwards, had listened to it as both an audio play and a audio book and had seen the film many times, I had never read the original book. Indeed until now the only Chandler novels I had read were The Lady in the Lake and Poodle Springs. But these facsimile first UK editions from Hamish Hamilton/Pan were enough to provoke me into buying the entire set. There are five in this set, released to celebrate the seventy years that Hamish Hamilton have been publishing Chandler. That's The Big Sleep, Farewell my Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye. All of which are direct copies of the original UK editions.

They're lovely looking book and complete replicas of the original UK first edition - everything is as it was then. Even the back cover features a listing of other thrillers released that month in 1939, none of which have survived the test of time in the way The Big Sleep has. What can I say about reading the book as a new reader today? Well obviously the style reminded me of the Robert Parker books as well as most of the other private dick novels I have read but Chandler was there first, his was the blueprint was both the brevity of style and the lone PI character himself. It reminds me of listening to the radio in 1995 when The Beatles reworked an old Lennon demo into the all new Beatle song, Free as a Bird. Anyway this young kid was being interviewed as part of a radio road show and the Beatles song played to him. The kid said they sounded OK but were copying Oasis's style. Same thing with Chandler - reading him now the uninformed would say this guy is too much like other PI writers which is testament to the importance of Chandler and Marlowe and of how they set the benchmark for others to follow.

One thing I especially liked about these books is that the covers are printed with the odd blemish and scratch so that they actually look aged - though of the quality that would be defined as very fine or whatever the category they use for very very good condition.

And back to The Big Sleep - well I'm not qualified to give any major insight but I am perfectly enabled in saying - that it reads as well today as it would have ever done. It's pacey, not dated in the slightest and the character of Marlowe is as contemporary as tomorrow's headlines. I can't read Marlowe without seeing Bogart's mug in my mind and that's not a bad thing - that ugly, handsome face fits the pivotal private eye like a glove

RAYMOND CHANDLER

Earlier this week saw the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death - The excellent Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog has a list of some great Chandler related posts published to coincide with the anniversary. HERE