Anty Boisjoly is back to fill the gap that overlaps between Cosy Mystery and Wodehouse history, and where Jerome K Jerome meets Dorothy L Sayers.

It’s another mystifying, manor house mystery for Wodehousian bon-vivant and problem-solver Anty Boisjoly, when his clubmate asks him to determine who died first after a duel is fought in a locked room. The untold riches of the Tenpenny Tontine are in the balance, but the stakes only get higher when Anty determines that, duel or not, this was a case of murder.

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Raymond Chandler’s dead so he won’t object if I speak for him with regards to how he’d react to The Black-Eyed Blonde, the second effort to appropriate his voice and most famous creation, Philip Marlowe. I’m quite certain that he wouldn’t give a shit.

Chandler was an iconoclast, unimpressed and unintimidated by what were considered the giants of literature, even when he was forcibly inducted into their number, so he could hardly have objected to an irreverent cannibalisation of his own canon.

However that’s not what this is. The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black (the nom de pulp of high concept Irish writer John Banville) is a meticulous homage, and it shows. It’s not a rip-off nor a convincing forgery. It doesn’t take Philip Marlowe into uncharted territory and it doesn’t subvert the genre. And all that would be fine with both me and Mr. Chandler, I’m quite sure, if it achieved the only goal that could logically remain — to read as though it was written by Chandler.

The inventory is fully stocked. There’s a knock-out dame, naturally, and ruthless heavies and even a MacGuffin imported wholesale from The Long Goodbye. There’s a mystery within a mystery that has Marlowe searching for a man that’s supposed to be dead and turning up improbable links to those that definitely are. There are killings and beatings and a vibrant sexual tension between the main characters. Above all Chandler’s narrative style, punctuated with original and evocative similes, is faithfully duplicated.

But the Black-Eyed Blonde doesn’t try too hard, it tries way too hard to sound like Chandler, and the result is inorganic and arrhythmic. If you’re familiar with the original lore the constant reminders of people and places and events from previous books becomes quickly tiresome and heavy-handed, and if you’re not you’d presumably be misled into thinking that these diversions are in some way relevant to the plot. Why is Marlowe arguing with this random doctor that he called to discreetly look into an apparent overdose? Well obviously because some animosity remains from the affair that Marlowe had with the doctor’s wife in the Long Goodbye.

The narrative never rises to heights of “…a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back” (The Long Goodbye) or “She had eyes like strange sins.” (The High Window) but it’s not for lack of earnest effort. So instead we get overwrought exhibitions like “the rain was making the water in the lake look like a bed of nails.” and “the rain was coming down now like polished steel rods.” It’s not the Beatles, but an incredible simulation.

So the relationship between Marlowe and the sad-eyed Clare Cavendish is forced and inexplicable, the villains lack clear motivations and the inevitable similes are sterile and unrelated to the story. And the plot pays dutiful respect to this gallery of artifacts, even to the point of taking literally Chandler’s advice: “In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.”*

Having said all that, Chandler and I are going to have to lean toward recommending The Black Eyed Blonde. It’s definitely Chandleresque and so long as you’ve already read everything else in the canon plus Hammet, MacDonald and Himes, it’s the closest thing you’re going to find to a new book by Raymond Chandler published in 2014.

*1950 April 15, Saturday Review of Literature, The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler (There’s a 1944 version that doesn’t include the quote “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”) http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1950apr15-00013

Margie Harris might on her own represent two or three of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries in pulp fiction.

The first and most confounding is simply this — why is Margie Harris not an icon of pulp fiction? And indeed why did her entire share of the genre — gangster fiction — have such a short and incandescent golden age before dying out altogether?

Harris wrote prolifically for shamelessly and deliberately provocative monthlies with names like Gangster Stories and Gangland Stories and Racketeer Stories and Conflict, many of which regularly fell foul of government censors and had to be reminded that crime doesn’t pay or at any rate must never be shown to. Her career paralleled these pioneering anthologies and she contributed to them from their start in 1930 to their demise in the middle of the decade and short-lived comeback in 1939 and she was a natural:

Jimmy should have remembered that Smooth, before going to Ossining for a ten spot jolt, had been known as being stingy with words, lavish with action.
…
The crater made by the heavy slug gave him the look of some particularly obscene and horrible monster in human form; one possessed of three eyes, all leering with a hellish tolerance on the combined sins of the world.

Margie Harris, Facing the Mob, Gangland Stories, February 1931

Thematically, Harris’ specialty was the over-the-top mob thriller with quick tempers and quicker justice. Stylistically her specialty was the idiom. She employed what may or may not have been legitimate street jargon lavishly and yet somehow accessibly — you just know without ever before seeing it in this context that a yard is a hundred dollars and a ten spot jolt is a ten year sentence in Sing Sing (the idiomatic name, incidentally, for Ossining State Prison in upstate New York).

Harris deployed her gats and gunsels and molls and meat wagons with an unselfconscious fluency in much the same way that Hammett and Chandler would employ the hard-boiled simile and to similar effect. Her narrative has a lyricism and tempo that accompany the high-octane, revenge-driven plots like a saxophone.

The second great mystery of Margie Harris is who was Margie Harris? All that’s known of her for sure is that she didn’t exist. Margie Harris was the pseudonym of someone who almost certainly wrote gangland stories as an aside to another, possibly more prominent career as a journalist and/or police officer and/or gangster. And the closest thing we have to a clue is a letter Harris wrote to pulp innovator Harold Hersey, publisher of Gangster Stories, in response to the growing curiosity of his readership and their doubts that a woman could write such gritty material.

A biographical sketch of Margie Harris?
Scram, Baby; whaddyuh think I am, a canary —yelpin’ on myself?
I got your slant, though, somebody’s maybe asked “Who’s this frail who cracks wise from the inside?”
Just another twist, sisters and brothers — maybe, but look out for my lipstick. You know some of the sugar Molls carry one for their own use, one for “the other Jane” — and that one has cyanide in it. So look out for my lipstick, too.
How did I get that way? Maybe newspaper work; maybe just associates…

Gangster Stories, June 1931

The complete letter can be found in in City of Numbered Men, the Best of Prison Stories and Queen of the Gangsters: Vol 1: Broadwalk Empire (sic: yes, Broadwalk) along with author John Locke’s compelling and convincing analysis implying that Harris acquired at least some of her facility with gangland culture by association with genuine mobsters.

Harris wrote her last story under the name in 1939 and then left us forever. Maybe she went on the lam or took a powder. I sure hope she wasn’t deep-sixed and I like to assume that we continue to admire her work under her other aliases.