Channelling Chandler: Banville is back in Black

[Independent, 1 march 2014]

John Banville, adds Raymond Chandler to his workload and list of alter-egos with the publiaction of the Philip Marlowe thriller 'The Black-Eyed Blonde' next week. He tells Edel Coffey why he isn't the least bit fazed

Edel Coffey

There's something unreal about John Banville. He arrives for our interview as silently as a cat, or a figment of your imagination. He pads across the soft carpeted room in a 1950s-style suit, a blood-red handkerchief spurting forth from his breast pocket like the blood from a clown's gunshot wound. He looks just like a character from a Raymond Chandler book. Which is fitting, as Banville has just added Chandler to his list of alter-egos.

Famous for his slow work rate,Banville is becoming somewhat prolific in his later years. He still writes at a rate of about a paragraph a day for his Banville books but he has bashed out six novels under the name Benjamin Black in the last eight years and has just written The Black-Eyed Blonde, the first Philip Marlowe detective book commissioned by the Chandler estate.

With books like The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, Chandler is a godhead in crime fiction. Did Banville have any qualms about taking Chandler's detective Marlowe, one of the genre's best-loved characters, and writing a new story for him?

"I had to treat him with a certain respect but I wasn't apprehensive. I'm an old hack by now, I've been doing these things for so long I don't worry."

Did he consider the ethics of tinkering with another writer's creation? "I have to confess I didn't think in those terms. I don't give Marlowe quite that much reality. He is an invention, a figment of Chandler's imagination."

Would he feel the same way if he was asked to write a new Henry Jamesnovel, for example? "I was just about to say that one of the ideas I had for a Banville book would be to write a sequel to The Portrait Of A Lady because it ends ambiguously, but Henry James is such a great artist that I felt I would simply be picking on his bones. With Chandler I didn't feel that."

It's not the first instance of a writer taking on a dead writer's characters and rewriting them for a new market. The Ian Fleming estate has been publishingJames Bond novels written by various writers for years; Eoin Colfer wrote a follow-up to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy; and Joanna Trollope recently published a rebooted version of Sense and Sensibility, complete with iPhones.

"It's in fashion at the moment to do follow-ups but I also think it's a dull time in fiction. I think mainly because television is so strong, HBO and the Scandinavian things are doing what the novel used to do so there's a certain shaking of confidence in fiction."

Banville's Benjamin Black character, Quirke, is currently enjoying a stint on RTÉ, played by Gabriel Byrne, but Banville claims no credit. "I had nothing to do with Quirke. I went to one of the read-throughs but that's it. I didn't have any input or say. When you give a book to television you give it up, it's gone, it's not yours anymore."