"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."
These are the lines that open the novel. This type of writing reflects a style that came to be known as hard-boiled narration. This style is one that a reader can more easily recognize than describe. The book is a novel that takes up the storytelling of an iconic hardboiled detective by a new writer. The hardboiled detective story relies heavily upon narrative and plot mechanics, of course, but without certain stylistic flourishes such as a self-aware telephone and descriptions of hat-wearing men in the heart of the city in post-Depression America, the plot will not really matter. From its title through this opening paragraph to the very end of the book The Black-Eyed Blonde is as much an exercise in recreating writing style as it is an attempt to resurrect an iconoclastic figure in American fiction.
"That tired old sign reading `Fagots—Stay Out' was still behind the bar. That's a thing I've noticed about Barney's kind of people: they're not very good at spelling. Barney must have been thinking of some other word with one g, like bigot."
This novel was published six decades after Raymond Chander bid the long goodbye to Philip Marlowe in 1953. The author of The Black-Eyed Blonde was faced with a conundrum. How to write a novel about a mid-20th century character while remaining true to the hardboiled detective narrative style while dealing with a substantially changed zeitgeist. This particular quote is a demonstration of how this tricky predicament was resolved. Marlowe is treading into waters of sexual discrimination which certainly existed in the 1950s but which would have been dealt with in a far less socially acceptable way. The author finds a way to work around this conflict by revealing the depth of prejudicial bias against homosexuality but softening the harsh portrait by having Marlowe illustrate an unexpected—and perhaps unlikely—intellectually elevated open-mindedness on the subject.
"Then she remembered who she was supposed to be, and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and leaned her head back lazily, showing off her snowy throat; I guessed Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, which was one I had seen."
Although certainly an example of hardboiled detective fiction, the stories in which Philip Marlowe finds himself, including this one, would also fit comfortably into film noir if they were movies instead of novels. Marlowe's Los Angeles is a world of ambiguous morality and a fluid sense of identity. The reference here is to what many consider the ultimate iconic example of film noir in which a sap falls under the sway of a manipulative black widow to pull not just murder but insurance fraud. The only thing pulling the cases of Marlowe completely out of the world of noir is that he no sap. Or, at any rate, he is not a sap by the end. The specter of Hollywood and movies hangs over the narrative, helping to foster the sense of distrust engendered by shifting identities. That theme is also touched upon here in Marlowe's seemingly offhand remark about the woman in question which opens this quote.
