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Originally Posted by ZodWallop
After reading a bunch of books (that I did enjoy) to finish a reading challenge, I'm back to reading my way through Raymond Chandler.
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Great minds think sort of alike.
I'm reading
Marlowe by John Banville (a.k.a.
The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black), a Philip Marlowe novel. I had planned on reading all of Chandler, and perhaps the two Marlowe novels by Robert B. Parker, before tackling it, and even started rereading
The Big Sleep, but although it had been so long since I read it the first time, everything seemed so familiar that after a couple of chapters my attention flagged and I fell prey to the siren song of something else and was lured away. But now that the movie version of
Marlowe with Liam Neeson is available for streaming, I thought that before it disappeared from the streaming platform again I'd hurry and read the book and then watch the movie. (That way it will be easier to confuse the two down the road.
)
So far, I like it, but I can't say how Chandleresque it is, not having read much Chandler and none of it recently (the aborted go at
The Big Sleep was a while back). I can't even say if he tried to mimic Chandler.
Normally I wouldn't be interested in continuations of an author's series by someone else -- the Spenser novels by anybody by Parker don't tempt me in the least, and the same goes for the Nero Wolfe books by anybody but Rex Stout -- but I've liked the John Banville (Benjamin Black) crime novels I've read, and I've read all of the Spenser books more than once, so I thought I'd give their takes on Philip Marlowe a try.
Quote:
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I'm on The Long Goodbye ...
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I had the movie version of
The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould (and, in a small role, a (fairly) young Arnold Schwarzenegger) on my watchlist, but I put off playing it for so long that it disappeared again from the streaming platform before I got to it. The last time I saw it must have been when it was a new movie in theaters.