The black-eyed blonde A Philip Marlowe novel

Review by New York Times Review

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. She is Clare Cavendish (née Langrishe), and she's a wealthy perfume heiress. 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. Given the track record of beautiful blondes walking into private investigators' offices, we know there's a lot more to her story. 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. It's all par for the course for Marlowe, who suffers beatings and stoically faces heartbreak, drinking his way through a heady labyrinth of double-crosses that leads to a visit from an old friend in a blood-soaked drawing room. It is, as they say, a page turner, and terrific fun. There are intimations of Black's Irish background in Clare Cavendish's mother, Dorothea Langrishe, "a tough old dame" whose husband, devoted to Michael Collins's cause, was killed in the Irish civil war in a particularly terrifying fashion. Another clue appears when Marlowe heads off to the Bull and Bear, noting that "I can't decide which are worse, bars that pretend to be Irish, with their plastic shamrocks and shillelaghs, or Cockney-fied joints like the Bull. I could describe it, but I haven't the heart." Like the model Black is following, the overall story is less important than the individual scenes, and charting the cause and effect from Marlowe's office to the corpse in the final pages may require a slug of whiskey and an aspirin. "Life is far more messy and disconnected than we let ourselves admit," Marlowe tells us. "Wanting things to make sense and be nice and orderly, we keep making up plots and forcing them on the way things really are. It's one of our weaknesses, but we cling to it for dear life, since without it there'd be no life at all, dear or otherwise." Despite the loyalty to Chandler that Black displays here, by the end of "The Black-Eyed Blonde" there's an odd emptiness. Not merely the existential emptiness of the noir novel, where the hero is left, as always, alone, but a deeper emptiness, a suggestion that literary style has triumphed over content, leaving a hollowed-out place where the emotion should have been. Halfway through, I was already asking myself a poisonous question: Why write a book that reads so completely like Raymond Chandler 61 years after the publication of "The Long Goodbye," his last great novel? By now the conventions of noir fiction, as created by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, have become such a part of our world, and so often parodied, that we can almost predict them before opening the next book. The femme fatale walking into the P.I.'s office and twisting him around her pretty finger while lying through her teeth; the drinking and the bursts of violence; the high-society folks with secrets to sweep under the rug; the soulless thugs and surly cops; and the dead who are, inevitably, not dead. Black has included them all here - and well - yet despite the impressiveness of his achievement, a reader in 2014 expects something fresher, if only the inversion of a few conventions. I was reminded of Jorge Luis Borges's satirical story "Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote,'" in which a 20th-century writer is reproducing "Don Quixote" word for word. The argument is that the new version is an original work because Menard's times, life experience and purpose are different from those of Cervantes. What was once a picaresque novel is now a historical novel written, impressively, in an archaic language. "The Black-Eyed Blonde," a novel that reads like a lost Chandler original but is written by a contemporary author, raises the question: What, beyond imitation and a paycheck, is Black's purpose? AM I BEING a killjoy? Probably, because despite my complaints I found "The Black-Eyed Blonde" entertaining, and any fan of Chandler's work is going to enjoy it. Yet when a novelist of Banville's stature resurrects one of the genre's luminaries, he inspires the hope that this new outing will compete with Chandler and Marlowe's finest appearances, even in some small postmodern way. Instead, this walk down the mean streets feels like one we've already taken in some half-forgotten Bogart movie, returning to a time when men were men and the women were so alluring, as the line from "Farewell, My Lovely" goes, they could "make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." Then again, that may be justification enough. 'Life is far more messy and disconnected,' Marlowe reflects, 'than we ... admit.' OLEN STEINHAUER is the author of eight novels, including "The Tourist." His ninth, "The Cairo Affair," will be published this month.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 16, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

He put out his right hand for me to shake. It was like being given a sleek, cool-skinned animal to hold for a moment or two. That must be Philip Marlowe talking, right? It is, sort of. Black (the mystery-writing pseudonym for Irish writer John Banville) offers a stylish homage to Raymond Chandler in this tightly written caper that picks up Marlowe's life from the point the series ended. Naturally, it begins with a leggy blonde easing her silky body into Marlowe's office chair and spinning a story that turns out to be about half poppycock. Marlowe takes the bait, of course, and begins to search for a con man whose death may have been exaggerated. The plot is nearly impenetrable in classic Chandler fashion, and there are numerous allusions to the earlier books, including the surprise appearance of a character from The Long Goodbye whose presence will either enrage or enthrall devoted fans. The focus, though, as it was for Chandler, is on style and mood, and the Irishman, perhaps surprisingly, nails both. The homage game is a tricky one to play, but Black makes all the right moves. Great fun for Chandlerians.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Veteran narrator Boutsikaris turns in a mixed performance in this audio edition of Black's resurrection of Raymond Chandler's intrepid Bay City PI Philip Marlowe. In classic noir tradition, it all starts with a black-eyed class act walking into Marlowe's office looking to hire the gumshoe to find missing lover Nico Peterson. Marlowe agrees to take the case, but of course nothing is what it seems, and the mean streets of the early 1950s are the dark and twisted kind, where violence, deceit, and corruption are simply the costs of doing business. Boutsikaris does a standout job of bringing Black's characters to life. Thug or cop, heiress or moll, he gives them all distinct voices that fit well with the book's Chandleresque prose and dialogue. But Boutsikaris's Marlowe isn't quite right. While the narrator offers a perfectly serviceable reading that certainly hits all the right notes, his characterization comes across as a softer, gentler creation, and less the tough, tarnished knight who sees the sins of the world with a weary, cynical eye. A Henry Holt hardcover. (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

The titular black-eyed blonde of Black's tribute to Raymond Chandler is Philip Marlowe's new client, who wants the detective to find a missing former boyfriend. But Marlowe soon learns that the boyfriend is in the morgue, and the case grows more complicated as he searches from the mansions of the city's wealthiest families to the seediest dive bars to discover why this man is so important to his client. As the bodies pile up, Marlowe struggles to separate the lies from the truth, with some grudging help from his few friends in the police department. With perhaps fewer memorable descriptions that characterized Robert B. Parker's Marlowe novels Poodle Springs and Perchance To Dream, Black (A Death in Summer; Vengeance) does deliver a more complex and satisfying mystery than other authors have done in the past. VERDICT This latest incarnation of Chandler's sleuth will appeal to fans of Chandler and Marlowe, but newcomers to one of the first great PIs in crime fiction will find much to enjoy here as well. [See Prepub Alert, 10/15/13.]-Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Man Booker Prizewinning novelist John Banville, already disguised as mystery writer Black (Holy Orders, 2013, etc.), goes under even deeper cover to imitate Raymond Chandler in this flavorsome pastiche. Nobody knows better than Clare Cavendish that self-styled Hollywood agent Nico Peterson is dead. Clare saw her ex-lover killed by a hit-and-run driver outside the Cahuilla Club two months ago. But she hires peerless shamus Philip Marlowe to find him anyway sincethough she doesn't tell Marlowe this part at firstshe's just seen Nico in San Francisco, clearly alive. Marlowe follows the obvious leads without results. Sgt. Joe Green at Central Homicide is naturally skeptical of the unnamed client's claim. Nico's one marginally successful client, starlet Mandy Rogers, says she knows nothing about him, and he wasn't her agent anyway. Floyd Hanson, the Cahuilla Club manager who identified the corpse, has nothing to add to what he told the cops. The closest thing to a break in the case is Marlowe's conversation with Nico's sister, which is interrupted when she's kidnapped by a pair of Mexicans and later killed. Clearly there's more to the story than anyone's telling. But the most suspicious character is (surprise!) Marlowe's client, who's clearly up to her mascara in unsavory connections to big money, big crime and the big sleep. Black's plotting is no better than Chandler's, but he has Marlowe's voice down to a fault. Both the dialogue and the narration crawl with overblown, Chandler-esque similes ("He looked like a scaled-down version of Cecil B. DeMille crossed with a retired lion tamer"), and devotees will recognize borrowings from Farewell, My Lovely, The Little Sister and, most unforgivably, The Long Goodbye, which Black's audacious finale makes just a little bit longer. The portrait of 1950s LA is less precise than Chandler's, but the aging, reflective Marlowe is appropriately sententious. A treat for fans, even if they end up throwing it across the room.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it's being watched. Cars trickled past in the street below the dusty window of my office, and a few of the good folks of our fair city ambled along the sidewalk, men in hats, mostly, going nowhere. I watched a woman at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood, waiting for the light to change. Long legs, a slim cream jacket with high shoulders, navy blue pencil skirt. She wore a hat, too, a skimpy affair that made it seem as if a small bird had alighted on the side of her hair and settled there happily. She looked left and right and left again--she must have been so good when she was a little girl--then crossed the sunlit street, treading gracefully on her own shadow. So far it had been a lean season. I had done a week playing bodyguard to a guy who had flown in from New York on the clipper. He had a blue jaw and wore a gold wristband and a pinkie ring with a ruby in it as big as a boysenberry. He said he was a businessman and I decided to believe him. He was worried, and sweated a lot, but nothing happened and I got paid. Then Bernie Ohls in the Sheriff's office put me in touch with a nice little old lady whose hophead son had pinched her late husband's rare coin collection. I had to apply a little muscle to get the goods back, but nothing serious. There was a coin in there with the head of Alexander the Great on it, and another one showing Cleopatra in profile, with that big nose of hers--what did they all see in her? The buzzer sounded to announce that the outer door had opened, and I heard a woman walk across the waiting room and pause a moment at the door of my office. The sound of high heels on a wooden floor always gets something going in me. I was about to call to her to come in, using my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me-I'm-a-detective voice, when she came in anyway, without knocking. She was taller than she had seemed when I saw her from the window, tall and slender with broad shoulders and trim hips. My type, in other words. The hat she wore had a veil, a dainty visor of spotted black silk that stopped at the tip of her nose--and a nice tip it was, to a very nice nose, aristocratic but not too narrow or too long, and nothing at all like Cleopatra's jumbo schnozzle. She wore elbow-length gloves, pale cream to match her jacket, and fashioned from the hide of some rare creature that had spent its brief life bounding delicately over Alpine crags. She had a good smile, friendly, so far as it went, and a little lopsided in an attractively sardonic way. Her hair was blond and her eyes were black, black and deep as a mountain lake, the lids exquisitely tapered at their outer corners. A blonde with black eyes--that's not a combination you get very often. I tried not to look at her legs. Obviously the god of Tuesday afternoons had decided I deserved a little lift. "The name is Cavendish," she said. I invited her to sit down. If I'd known it was me she was coming to call on, I would have brushed my hair and applied a dab of bay rum behind my earlobes. But she had to take me as I was. She didn't seem to disapprove too much of what she was seeing. She sat down in front of my desk on the chair I had pointed her to and took off her gloves finger by finger, studying me with her steady black eyes. "What can I do for you, Miss Cavendish?" I asked. "Mrs." "Sorry--Mrs. Cavendish." "A friend told me about you." "Oh, yes? Good things, I hope." I offered her one of the Camels I keep in a box on my desk for clients, but she opened her patent leather purse and took out a silver case and flipped it open with her thumb. Sobranie Black Russian--what else? When I struck a match and offered it across the desk she leaned forward and bent her head, with dipped lashes, and touched a fingertip briefly to the back of my hand. I admired her pearl-pink nail polish, but didn't say so. She sat back in the chair and crossed her legs under the narrow blue skirt and gave me that coolly appraising look again. She was taking her time in deciding what she should make of me. "I want you to find someone," she said. "Right. Who would that be?" "A man named Peterson--Nico Peterson." "Friend of yours?" "He used to be my lover." If she expected me to swallow my teeth in shock, she was disappointed. "Used to be?" I said. "Yes. He disappeared, rather mysteriously, without even saying goodbye." "When was this?" "Two months ago." Why had she waited so long before coming to me? I decided not to ask her, or not yet, anyway. It gave me a funny feeling, being looked at by those cool eyes behind the veil's transparent black mesh. It was like being watched through a secret window; watched, and measured. "You say he disappeared," I said. "You mean out of your life, or altogether?" "Both, it seems." I waited for more, but she only leaned back a farther inch or so and smiled again. That smile: it was like something she had set a match to a long time ago and then left to smolder on by itself. She had a lovely upper lip, prominent, like a baby's, soft-looking and a little swollen, as if she had done a lot of kissing recently, and not kissing babies, either. She must have sensed my unease about the veil, and put up a hand now and lifted it away from her face. Without it, the eyes were even more striking, a lustrous shade of seal-black that made something catch in my throat. "So tell me about him," I said, "your Mr. Peterson." "Tallish, like you. Dark. Handsome, in a weak sort of way. Wears a silly mustache, Don Ameche-style. Dresses nicely, or used to, when I had a say in the matter." She had taken a short ebony holder from her purse and was fitting the Black Russian into it. Deft, those fingers; slender, but with strength in them. "What does he do?" I asked. She glanced at me with a steely twinkle. "For a living, you mean?" She pondered the question. "He sees people," she said. This time I leaned back in my chair. "How do you mean?" I asked. "Just what I say. Practically every time I saw him, he was about to leave urgently. I gotta see this guy. There's this guy I gotta go see. " She was a good mimic; I was beginning to get a picture of Mr. Peterson. He didn't sound like her type. "A busy fellow, then," I said. "His busyness had few results, I'm afraid. At any rate, not results that you'd notice, or that I noticed, anyway. If you ask him, he'll tell you he's an agent to the stars. The people he had to see so urgently were usually connected to one of the studios." It was interesting, the way she kept switching tenses. All the same, I had the impression that he was very much the past, for her, this Peterson bird. So why did she want him found? "He's in the movie business?" I asked. "I wouldn't say in . Sort of scrabbling at the edges with his fingertips. He had some success with Mandy Rogers." "Should I know the name?" "Starlet--ingénue, Nico would say. Think Jean Harlow without the talent." "Jean Harlow had talent?" She smiled at that. "Nico is firmly of the belief that all his geese are swans." I got out my pipe and filled it. It struck me that the tobacco blend I was using had some Cavendish in it. I decided not to share this happy coincidence with her, imagining the jaded smile and the twitch of disdain at the corner of her mouth that would greet it. "Known him long, your Mr. Peterson?" I asked. "Not long." "How long would not long be?" She shrugged, which involved a fractional lift of her right shoulder. "A year?" She made it a question. "Let me see. It was summer when we met. August, maybe." "Where was that? That you met, I mean." "The Cahuilla Club. Do you know it? It's in the Palisades. Polo grounds, swimming pools, lots of bright, shiny people. The kind of place that wouldn't let a shamus like you put his foot inside the electronically controlled gates." That last bit she didn't say, but I heard it all the same. "Your husband know about him? About you and Peterson?" "I really can't say." "Can't, or won't?" "Can't." She glanced down at the cream gloves where she had draped them across her lap. "Mr. Cavendish and I have--what shall I say? An arrangement." "Which is?" "You're being disingenuous, Mr. Marlowe. I'm sure you know very well the kind of arrangement I mean. My husband likes polo ponies and cocktail waitresses, not necessarily in that order." "And you?" "I like many things. Music, mainly. Mr. Cavendish has two reactions to music, depending on mood and state of sobriety. Either it makes him sick or it makes him laugh. He does not have a melodious laugh." I got up from the desk and took my pipe to the window and stood looking out at nothing in particular. In an office across the street, a secretary in a tartan blouse and wearing earphones from a Dictaphone machine was bent over her typewriter, tapping away. I had passed her in the street a few times. Nice little face, shy smile; the kind of girl who lives with her mother and cooks meat loaf for Sunday lunch. This is a lonely town. "When's the last time you saw Mr. Peterson?" I asked, still watching Miss Remington at her work. There was silence behind me, and I turned. Obviously, Mrs. Cavendish was not prepared to address herself to anyone's back. "Don't mind me," I said. "I stand at this window a lot, contemplating the world and its ways." I came back and sat down again. I put my pipe in the ashtray and clasped my hands together and propped my chin on a couple of knuckles to show her how attentive I could be. She decided to accept this earnest demonstration of my full and unwavering concentration. She said, "I told you when I saw him last--about a month ago." "Where was that?" "At the Cahuilla, as it happens. A Sunday afternoon. My husband was engaged in a particularly strenuous chukker. That's a--" "A round in polo. Yes, I know." She leaned forward and dropped a few flakes of cigarette ash beside the bowl of my pipe. A faint waft of her perfume came across the desk. It smelled like Chanel No. 5, but then, to me all perfumes smell like Chanel No. 5, or did up to then. "Did Mr. Peterson give any indication that he was about to decamp?" I asked. "Decamp? That's an odd word to use." "It seemed less dramatic than disappeared, which was your word." She smiled and gave a dry little nod, conceding the point. "He was much as usual," she said. "A little bit more distracted, perhaps, a little nervous, even--though maybe it only seems that way in hindsight." I liked the way she talked; it made me think of the ivy-covered walls of venerable colleges, and trust fund details written out on parchment in a copperplate hand. "He certainly didn't give any strong indication that he was about to"--she smiled again--"decamp." I thought for a bit, and let her see me thinking. "Tell me," I said, "when did you realize he was gone? I mean, when did you decide he had"--now it was my turn to smile--"disappeared?" "I telephoned him a number of times and got no answer. Then I called at his house. The milk hadn't been canceled and the newspapers had been piling up on his porch. It wasn't like him to leave things like that. He was careful, in some ways." "Did you go to the police?" Her eyes widened. "The police?" she said, and I thought she might laugh. "That wouldn't have done at all. Nico was rather shy of the police, and he would not have thanked me for putting them onto him." "Shy in what way?" I asked. "Did he have things to hide?" "Haven't we all, Mr. Marlowe?" Again she dilated those lovely lids. "Depends." "On what?" "On many things." This was going nowhere, in ever-increasing circles. "Let me ask you, Mrs. Cavendish," I said, "what do you think has become of Mr. Peterson?" Once more she did her infinitesimal shrug. "I don't know what to think. That's why I've come to you." I nodded--sagely, I hoped--then took up my pipe and did some business with it, tamping the dottle, and so on. A tobacco pipe is a very handy prop, when you want to seem thoughtful and wise. "May I ask," I asked, "why you waited so long before coming to me?" "Was it a long time? I kept thinking I'd hear from him, that the phone would ring one day and he'd be calling from Mexico or somewhere." "Why would he be in Mexico?" "France, then, the Côte d'Azur. Or somewhere more exotic--Moscow, maybe, Shanghai, I don't know. Nico liked to travel. It fed his restlessness." She sat forward a little, showing the faintest trace of impatience. "Will you take the case, Mr. Marlowe?" "I'll do what I can," I said. "But let's not call it a case, not just yet." "What are your terms?" "The usual." "I can't say I know what the usual is likely to be." I hadn't really thought she would. "A hundred dollars deposit and twenty-five a day plus expenses while I'm making my inquiries." "How long will they take, your inquiries?" "That too depends." She was silent for a moment, and again her eyes took on that appraising look, making me squirm a little. "You haven't asked me anything about myself," she said. "I was working my way around to it." "Well, let me save you some work. My maiden name is Langrishe. Have you heard of Langrishe Fragrances, Inc.?" "Of course," I said. "The perfume company." "Dorothea Langrishe is my mother. She was a widow when she came over from Ireland, bringing me with her, and founded the business here in Los Angeles. If you've heard of her, then you know how successful she has been. I work for her--or with her, as she'd prefer to say. The result is that I'm quite rich. I want you to find Nico Peterson for me. He's a poor thing but mine own. I'll pay you whatever you ask." I considered poking at my pipe again but thought it would seem a little obvious the second time around. Instead I gave her a level look, making my eyes go blank. "As I said, Mrs. Cavendish--a hundred down and twenty-five a day, plus expenses. The way I work, every case is a special case." She smiled, pursing her lips. "I thought you weren't going to call it a case, as yet." I decided to let her have that one. I pulled open a drawer and brought out a standard contract and pushed it across the desk to her with the tip of one finger. "Take that with you, read it, and if you agree with the terms, sign it and get it back to me. In the meantime, give me Mr. Peterson's address and phone number. Also anything else you think might be useful to me." She gazed at the contract for a moment, as if she were deciding whether to take it or throw it in my face. In the end she picked it up, folded it carefully, and put it in her purse. "He has a place in West Hollywood, off Bay City Boulevard," she said. She opened her purse again and took out a small leather-bound notebook and a slim gold pencil. She wrote in the notebook briefly, then tore out the page and handed it to me. "Napier Street," she said. "Keep a sharp eye out or you'll miss it. Nico prefers secluded spots." "On account of being so shy," I said. She stood up, while I stayed sitting. I smelled her perfume again. Not Chanel, then, but Langrishe, the name or number of which I would dedicate myself to finding out. "I'll need a contact for you, too," I said. She pointed to the piece of paper in my hand. "I've put my telephone number on there. Call me whenever you need to." I read her address: 444 Ocean Heights. Had I been alone, I would have whistled. Only the cream get to live out there, on private streets right by the waves. "I don't know your name," I said. "I mean your first name." For some reason this brought a mild flush to her cheeks, and she looked down, then quickly up again. "Clare," she said. "Without an i . I'm called after our native county, in Ireland." She made a slight, mock-doleful grimace. "My mother is something of a sentimentalist where the old country is concerned." I put the notebook page into my wallet, rose, and came from behind the desk. No matter how tall you might be, there are certain women who make you feel shorter than they are. I was looking down on Clare Cavendish, but it felt as if I were looking up. She offered me her hand, and I shook it. It really is something, the first touch between two people, no matter how brief. I saw her to the elevator, where she gave me a last quick smile and was gone. Back in my office, I took up my station at the window. Miss Remington was tap-tappeting still, diligent girl that she was. I willed her to look up and see me, but in vain. What would I have done, anyway--waved, like an idiot? I thought about Clare Cavendish. Something didn't add up. As a private eye I'm not completely unknown, but why would a daughter of Dorothea Langrishe of Ocean Heights and who knew how many other swell spots choose me to find her missing man? And why, in the first place, had she got herself involved with Nico Peterson, who, if her description of him was accurate, would turn out to be nothing but a cheap grifter in a sharp suit? Long and convoluted questions, and hard to concentrate on while remembering Clare Cavendish's candid eyes and the amused, knowing light that shone in them. When I turned, I saw the cigarette holder on the corner of my desk, where she had left it. The ebony was the same glossy blackness as her eyes. She'd forgotten to pay me my retainer, too. It didn't seem to matter. 
Copyright © 2014 by Benjamin Black Excerpted from The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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