Marlowe finds himself in deep water – literally – and needs all of his cunning to extricate himself from this thorny case. He uncovers the truth behind the veneer of a rich gentleman’s club, and is visited by a ghost from the past. As he becomes intimately embroiled in Cavendish’s case and discovers more about Peterson’s unlawful activities, Marlowe finds himself is threatened by a local gangster. Of course Marlowe must fall for the dame, a dame who neglects to pay him at that, so he embarks on a search for Peterson. Although she’s a married woman and comes from a rich and influential family, Clare Cavendish needs Marlowe’s help in tracking down the slippery but charming Nico Peterson, whose disappearance is of some concern to her. Cue a beautiful, mysterious and slightly tortured female client – the black-eyed blonde of the title – in search of an errant former lover. In true Chandler fashion, the story opens in the early 1950s in a steaming hot Los Angeles, with our introspective gumshoe detective sweating in his office, and awaiting his next case. Joe Gores did a fantastic job with Spade & Archer, a proposed prequel to The Maltese Falcon, and we hoped Benjamin Black had produced something equally fitting. Using a title Chandler might even have used himself, The Black Eyed Blonde, Black has chosen an unenviable task – to try and be completely authentic to Chandler’s original tone of voice and come up with a story that fits into the canon. Here he writes as Benjamin Black, embarking on a homage to Raymond Chandler by recreating Philip Marlowe in a story meant to follow on from the 1953 novel The Long Goodbye. Author John Banville has won the Booker Prize. Soon Marlowe will find himself not only under the spell of the Black-Eyed Blonde but tangling with one of Bay City's richest families - and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune. Then a new client arrives: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, Clare Cavendish wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson.

In Los Angeles, Private Detective Philip Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow.

Clare? The rest would be easy to put out of my mind, but not the black-eyed blonde.' It is the early 1950s. 'Maybe it was time I forgot about Nico Peterson, and his sister, and the Cahuilla Club, and Clare Cavendish.

The black eyed blonde by benjamin black