Billed as a Philip Marlowe novel, The Black Eyed Blonde involves a double impersonation. Now the latest Chandler retread comes motoring down the boulevard. But then nobody ever called Ludlum the greatest American stylist of the century.

Jason Bourne is now written by either Eric Van Lustbader or a team of corporate robots.

In Robert Ludlum’s case, rather than close down the goldmine when the writer died, his publishers continue churning out books under his name. At least Parker put his own name on the cover. A passable exercise in ventriloquism, it serves mainly to highlight the pointlessness of the exercise. Parker, an author of the Chandler school, fleshed out and completed the opening chapters of Poodle Springs, a sketchy and unfinished manuscript provided by Chandler’s literary executors. In the 55 years since his death, numerous attempts have been made to replicate his style and resurrect his emblematic protagonist, Philip Marlowe. Born of the short stories he wrote for 25-cent pulps and populated with stock characters – the cynical private eye, conniving dames, the rotten rich and thuggish gangsters – his novels have outlasted and outshone much of the high literature of the period in which they were first published.

Like Hemingway, Raymond Chandler is both easy to parody and impossible to counterfeit. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City's richest families and developing a singular appreciation for how far they will go to protect their fortune.In this gripping and deeply evocative crime novel, Benjamin Black returns us to the dark, mesmerising world of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye and his singular detective Philip Marlowe.FICTION The Black Eyed Blonde BENJAMIN BLACK MANTLE, $29.99 Marlowe sets off on his search, but almost immediately discovers that Peterson's disappearance is merely the first in a series of bewildering events. Then a new client is shown in: young, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she wants Marlowe to find her former lover, a man named Nico Peterson. Clare? The rest would be easy to put out of my mind, but not the black-eyed blonde.It is the early 1950s, Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and business is a little slow. Maybe it was time I forgot about Nico Peterson, and his sister, and the Cahuilla Club, and Clare Cavendish. This is the new Philip Marlowe mystery from the Booker Prize winning John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. Print The Black Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel

The black eyed blond