Enjoy It For What It Is

This isn't Raymond Chandler, and it's only intermittently Philip Marlowe, but it's a perfectly fine moody detective travelogue, and if you approach it with that in mind it's a fine entertainment.

The book is set mostly in San Diego, the Salton Sea area and El Centro, and Mazatlan, and if you know those areas it will be fun to visit them with Marlowe. Osborne is heavy handed in dropping place names and references and in proving his knowledge of local color, but I found that was one of the more appealing aspects of this book.

As to the Marlowe character, well, this Marlowe is old, (he acts even older than his stated years), tired, and worn out. The general air of glum weariness can be overwhelming, and we only catch occasional glimpses of a recognizable Marlowe. Divorced from the requirement that this character reflect what we know about Chandler's Marlowe, and treated just as some new character created anew by Osborne, this protagonist might still be interesting, but in a dreary and distinctly non-Marlowe fashion.

The plot is low key, the action is restrained, and we spend a lot of time sitting down. Osborne is at his best describing what we're looking at while we're sitting down, and he's very good at illuminating the undercurrents of Marlowe's conversations with other characters. Perhaps it is in that regard, more than any other, that the primary appeal of this book is to be found.

That may be cold comfort if what you're expecting is the miraculous reappearance of Raymond Chandler, but if you're happy with a noir-ish, thoughtful, anti-cozy tinged by tequila, regret and resignation, this could be a fine choice.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

I love Raymond Chandler's books so I was very excited to read more Philip Marlow. Marlow is the quintissential hardboiled detective and I was ready for more. I feel like Osborne did a great job of keeping with the spirit of Marlow and this was a well written read.

Sadly i missed so many nuisances because i never read Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe books. I know I’ve missed out on wonderful characters from the past books and yet happily i didn’t miss out on Phillip Marlowe himself. This book was enjoyable to read. As my father is in his later years it resonated the memory flashbacks, the forgetfulness that old age can bring and parallels this with the mental strength of other areas that can never be erased. This is Phillip Marlowe in his later years, his sleuthing has slowed down, his energy not what it once was, and still the super sleuth is a force to be reckoned with. Phillip Marlowe is the detective John Wayne might have been if he didn’t go into westerns and stepped into Noir Films instead.
I now have to go and check out Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe books just so i can see what he was like before his golden years.
Great book, but please, please do yourself a favor and start from the beginning with the 7 novels Raymond Chandler wrote before reading Only to Sleep because i have found in trying to review this book i am doing a disservice by not having read the other books. I just can’t compare and contrast with writing styles.
This book by Lawrence Osborne was most excellent though so do read it if you have read Chandler’s books.

Private Philip Marlow comes back alive.
Osborne does a wonderful job bringing back alive the tone and wonderful storytelling of this Marlow-type novel. The writing is so nicely done, at times, I wanted to read a sentence twice. There were times, I read a chapter for a second time. Clues are craftly given.
If you are a fan of the Marlow-style mystery story, this one of Osborne’s won’t disappoint.

Published by Hogarth on July 24, 2018

Only to Sleep is a Philip Marlowe novel. To his credit, Lawrence Osborne gives the impression of Raymond Chandler without trying to ape his style. Robert Parker tried to emulate Chandler’s style in a couple of Marlowe novels and wasn’t up to the task. Osborne writes in an eloquent style of his own that doesn’t purport to be the second coming of Chandler.

Osborne also makes a wise choice in crafting a novel that takes place decades after the Chandler novels. Parker couldn’t quite capture the west coast noir that Chandler invented; Osborne wisely chose not to try. He does, I think, engage in a credible exploration of Marlowe’s soul as it might have evolved in the detective’s declining years, and he incorporates elements of noir without trying to recreate a literary time and place that belonged to Chandler alone.

Osborne’s Marlowe is 72, retired, living in Mexico and fighting boredom when two men from an insurance company ask him to investigate a death that might be suspicious. An American developer named Donald Zinn drowned near a remote coastal village in Mexico, leaving a good bit of debt and a big insurance policy behind. His widow, Dolores Araya, identified the body and had it cremated in Mexico. The insurance company wonders whether Zinn might have been involved in something illegal, which would give it an excuse not to pay the widow. The men ask Marlowe to find out what Zinn had been doing in Mexico in the days before his death.

Marlowe talks to the widow and to the federales and to local fishermen before he gets a tip that sends him inland to talk to the man who went into hiding after finding Zinn’s body. Marlowe later takes the reader on a tour of inland Mexico, to places “of lanterns on chains and dozing habitués perched on sofas.” The local color is convincing; perhaps Osborne drove around Mexico before he wrote the novel, conducting research while he swatted mosquitos and drank cerveza.

The plot of Only to Sleep is much simpler than the convoluted story Chandler told in The Big Sleep, from which it repeatedly draws the titular metaphor of death. Osborne’s story at least makes sense, and to that extent simplicity is a virtue. Most of the detecting is done in the novel’s first half. In fact, the mystery has been solved the novel’s midway point. The second half addresses a mystery about Marlowe: now that he knows the truth, what will he do about it? He’ll get himself into trouble, of course, because as often as Marlowe decides it is time to let something go, he finds himself incapable of letting loose ends dangle.

This version of Marlowe is worn down and made porous by a life filled with grit. He dreams about the victims of violent death, some of whom he watched or helped die. He carries a cane, both to help him walk and because it conceals a sword, a last line of defense for a man who can’t use his fists as ably as he did in younger days. Marlowe relishes the opportunity to feel alive, “not yet senile and not yet shelved,” one final time before he returns to retirement and the inevitability of slow decline. Readers should also welcome the opportunity to join the icon of noir in one last adventure. It isn’t Chandler, but it stands on its own merit.

RECOMMENDED

ONLY TO SLEEP: A Philip Marlowe Novel
Lawrence Osborne
Hogarth
ISBN 978-1524759612
Hardcover
Mystery

Lawrence Osborne astutely states in his Author’s Note to ONLY TO SLEEP that stepping into the mind of another writer is “...a perilous proposition.” Just so. This is particularly true when the mind is that of an icon, the possessor of a household name known even to those who never read. Such is the case with the late Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s novels were (are) the finest of literary fiction which each and all happened to contain a mystery at their core, using a rumpled knight errant named Philip Marlowe as a tour guide through the dark end on the Los Angeles environs. The Marlowe novels have survived both the decades since they were written and obsessive rereadings. Osborne is only the third author after Robert B. Parker and John Manville (writing as Benjamin Black) to be asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to extend the Marlowe canon. ONLY TO SLEEP, the result, is a quietly riveting work, an homage to creator and creation that is nonetheless infused with Osborne’s own creative touch.

Osborne in ONLY TO SLEEP gives himself a considerable challenge. He brings us a septuagenarian Marlowe in the twilight of his life, living the life of an expatriate in Baja California in the late 1980s while keeping a seat warm in a local hotel bar. His peaceful, inebriated monotony is interrupted by the arrival of a couple of insurance company representatives. It seems that Donald Zinn, one of their elderly life insurance policyholders has died ---apparently accidentally --- by drowning while fishing in Mexico. The policy is quite large and the beneficiary is Donald’s widow, Delores Zinn, a woman less than half his age who has suddenly become very, very wealthy. Donald was cremated almost immediately, and the insurer is just a bit suspicious about the entire matter. It develops that the Donald, though supposedly a well to do building contractor, had turned welching on financial obligations into an art form, leaving a trail of creditors behind the wake of his corpse. The representatives want Marlowe to investigate the matter. Marlowe, at seventy-two, knows that he is too old to be involving himself in such work, but takes the case for the best of reasons: he needs the money. Those expecting fisticuffs in ONLY TO SLEEP have unreasonable expectations, given that Marlowe’s tough guy days are far behind him. What he lacks in physical acuity, however, he makes up for in his wits and the occasional use of a handy weapon. While Marlowe was a functioning alcoholic back in the day, however, his capacity for the spirits is not what it was, and he stumbles more than strolls his way through the investigation into what really happened to Zinn, as well as why and how it did. Whether walking or tripping, however, Marlowe remains persistent as his investigation takes him deep into Mexico off the beaten path. One takes the sense that Osborne is giving the reader more of a travelogue through Marlowe than a mystery novel, but that is fine. Marlowe is definitely a fish out of water and his fuzzy observations coupled with his occasionally unpredictable behavior heighten the suspense within ONLY TO SLEEP. One never really knows what is going to happen next. The only certainty is that Marlowe will persist --- staying true to his own rough-edged standards --- if not always in the best interests of his deep-pocketed client.

ONLY TO SLEEP deserves a place next to your Chandler volumes, and, like those, should be read and reread on a regular basis. Marlowe in the narrative occasionally and momentarily muses on the past glories of prior cases, including many that occurred in the thirty years between 1959 (when Chandler passed) and 1989 but have never been documented. If Chandler’s estate were to see fit to retain Osborne to visit that period and to cast light on those episodes I would be certainly be first in line to read them, if Osborne would be willing. Strongly recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2018, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

Book release announced in our Esotouric newsletter sent to 5000 people, mostly in L.A. Short blurb: Raymond Chandler was born 130 years ago this week, and rests forever under San Diego grass, but his literary creations refuse to die. Today sees release of the newest Raymond Chandler Estate-approved Philip Marlowe novel, Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne. This time out, the shamus is old and retired down Mexico way when a case comes calling. If you're keener on Marlowe in L.A., there's the new The Annotated Big Sleep, our own Chandler map or this Saturday's tour.

When I was seven years old my father was thirty-eight. His birthday was coming up and I did not want him to turn thirty-nine. He said he couldn’t help it, and that was when I first understood that my father could not do everything. Philip Marlowe, it seemed to me, was also eternally thirty-eight. Until this book. In “Only to Sleep,” Philip Marlowe is seventy-two, retired in Mexico, slowly drinking himself to death and using a cane. But he is still the Philip Marlowe of “The Big Sleep,” and “The Little Sister.” Chandler himself would recognize him.

Raymond Chandler said of his hero, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”

This is vintage Marlowe, which means that the plot is convoluted and the prose is dense. I don’t like spoilers so that is all I am going to say about it. In my opinion, Osborne gets it just right. Much of the book takes place in Mexico and made me wish that I knew more Spanish.

If you have always loved Philip Marlowe, or if you are somehow not acquainted with Chandler’s iconic detective, do yourself a favor and read this book, it is well worth your time.

2017 was the year I discovered Lawrence Osborne and my reading choices were summarily upended. By the end of the year, I had read 4 of his books – 2 fiction and 2 non-fiction – and, so far, in 2018, I’ve read 2 more. I’m purposefully leaving several back-catalog options available lest I sink helplessly into a deep funk when there are no more Osborne works left unread. (The foregoing disclosure is far more significant for purposes of obtaining my objectivity (none) than knowing that I received a digital copy for review.)
That aside, while I’m a determinedly eclectic reader, my fondness for detective, crime, mystery and thriller novels becomes apparent with a cursory glance at my GoodReads shelves. Add to that a preference for novels where most of the action takes place outside of the US and you see that I brought to Only to Sleep a fangirl’s high anticipation. What I did not bring to my reading of this novel was any set of expectations for the details of how Osborne would deliver against the opportunity he and John Banville, separately, received from the Raymond Chandler estate: to write a new Philip Marlowe novel. He includes an Author’s Note at the end that die-hard Chandler fans might want to peruse first. His core message? “I have tried to stay within the bounds of Marlowe’s fictional biography.”
That he does.
At the start of Only to Sleep, Philip Marlowe is 72 and retired. Hanging at a hotel bar. Needs a cane for navigation. A healthy, wealthy man has drowned. His widow is lovely and quite prompt in filing a claim on his life insurance policy. The insurer engages Marlowe to investigate the claim. Marlowe takes the case and begins to do what he does best, first in Baja, but mostly in Mexico. And Osborne is off to the races, as it were, giving us sentences like these:
"Through my sleep moved old monsters and charlatans. The old men beaten in alleyways decades ago, the women resigned to their twilights."
The plot is as opaque as the plots of the two Chandler novels I’ve read. Murky characters abound. The widow is only one of them. Marlowe is first intrigued, then determined, to get to the bottom of the mystery of the insured’s demise, but not necessarily in the way his client anticipated. Lots of traveling, hotels, adult beverages, dreams, darkness, bad guys, lies and misdirections. Osborne worked as a reporter on the US-Mexican border earlier in his career and brings those memories of the terrain and culture to the table here.
Mostly, though? Read Only to Sleep for Osborne’s writing.
“After they had left and as soon as the first stars had come out, a tolling bell began to echo from the hillsides above, and I let myself drift from the present backward in time. The sea became quiet. My cane rested between my legs almost like a companion dog while my real dog was off hunting chimera. The lights of the lobster boats came on, and I took my solitary tequila straight up.”

Chandler’s Marlowe is a towering figure in the lore of hardboiled gumshoes. He is so important to the literary genre that he stands nearly seventy feet tall and when he speaks the earth quivers. For such a towering figure, Chandler only bequeathed us seven full novels and a fistful of short stories. More recently, a host of writers have attempted to add to the Philip Marlowe lore, paying homage to Chandler’s work.

Osborne offers us, not another story set in the mean streets of Marlowe’s 1940’s Los Angeles, but an elder statesman Philip Marlowe. It’s the late 1980’s and this Marlowe is an old man with a cane, not as quick with his step. Here, Marlowe has retired to a village near Ensenada, drinking and idling away his golden years. Reluctantly, he accepts a final case, a final chance to do what he does best -investigate and figure it out. A young widow has claimed an insurance policy after her older husband’s body washes up on the beach in Mexico. And, here’s the elderly Marlowe plodding doggedly through Mexico trying to make sense of the little things he finds.

What Osborne captures in this book is the spirit of windswept sadness and melancholy as he recalls his glorious past and investigates. It’s a Mexico filled with dry desert roads, quiet resorts, and lost dreams. For me, this book may have held initial appeal as a Marlowe story, but with very little actual action sequences, it offers a rather fascinating story that was quite an enjoyable read. Indeed, it’s a story that stands up in its own - even if the main character didn’t share a name and a background with a famous literary character.

Thanks to Crown Publishing for providing a copy for review.