The twists and turns that follow involve missing persons, stone-cold Mexican hit men, easy-to-anger cops (Bernie Ohls, an old friend) and the impenetrable rich, as well as the participants in a gruesome and nearly fatal encounter at the indoor pool of the Cahuilla Club. Given the track record of beautiful blondes walking into private investigators’ offices, we know there’s a lot more to her story.

Within minutes, she turns up in Marlowe’s office - a “blonde with black eyes” - to ask for help finding her old lover, Nico Peterson, who has been missing for two months. She is Clare Cavendish (née Langrishe), and she’s a wealthy perfume heiress. We meet Black’s Marlowe at the window of his office in the Cahuenga Building, peering down as a long-legged woman crosses the street, noting from the way she carefully checks for traffic that “she must have been so good when she was a little girl.” Since this is the fictional Bay City, you can bet she isn’t so good anymore. It’s a challenge Banville obviously approached with pleasure, reveling in the opportunity to work up the ornate similes that are the stamp of Chandler’s prose. It’s no secret that Benjamin Black is the mystery-writing pseudonym of the Irish novelist John Banville, and so the idea of this prizewinning writer channeling one of the most recognizably literary of crime novelists makes a good deal of sense. Cancer sticks aside, “The Black-Eyed Blonde” could be passed off as a newly discovered Chandler manuscript found in some dusty La Jolla closet, leaving only linguistic detectives to ferret out the fraud.

Black recreates Marlowe’s voice (that is, Chandler writing Marlowe’s first-person narration) with such startling mimicry that a reader (this one, at least) can’t help cynically seeking out its flaws. That I made such an effort to research two insignificant words doesn’t merely peg me as the guy you don’t want to be stuck with at a party it says something about “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” Benjamin Black’s latest mystery, and his first to feature Raymond Chandler’s famous private eye. While a connection between tobacco and cancer was suggested in the 1930s in Germany, the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang places the earliest use of “cancer stick” at 1959 - which is not to say that it wasn’t used before then. About two-thirds of the way through “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” Philip Marlowe - that name might ring a bell - tells us he “lit up another cancer stick.” For a novel set in the early 1950s, this sounded anachronistic, so I went online to investigate.

The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black