Benjamin Black

Benjamin Black tells how he brought Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe back to life for a new adventure on the streets of Bay City, California. His novel The Black-Eyed Blonde is set in the early 1950s, Marlowe is as restless and lonely as ever, and a beautiful and expensively dressed new client hires him to find her former lover. Soon he is tangling with one of Bay City’s richest families and comes to understand how far they will go to protect their fortune.

Benjamin Black (John Banville) stopped by to talk about his latest novel on March 4, 2014. He let us know what he's been reading lately, and what foods he loves.

In The Silver Swan, his follow-up to last year's acclaimed crime novel Christine Falls, Benjamin Black (pseudonym of Booker Prize-winner John Banville) revisits 1950s Ireland as the pathologist Garret Quirke tracks down a young woman's dubious suicide.