Only to Sleep

May 21, 2018
Set in 1988, this successful attempt to channel the spirit of Raymond Chandler from Osborne (Beautiful Animals) finds 72-year-old Philip Marlowe living a quiet life in Baja California “after a low near-decade of sloth and decay and Ronald Reagan.” One day, two representatives of the Pacific Mutual insurance company call on Marlowe. Donald Zinn, a developer and a Pacific Mutual client, has drowned, apparently accidentally, off the coast of the Mexican state of Michoacán. The company is hoping that it can reduce its financial exposure if Marlowe finds evidence that Zinn, who was heavily in debt, took his own life or was involved in criminal activities. The PI agrees to look into the matter, starting with a visit to the resort that Zinn and his widow had been running. While the plot follows familiar paths, Osborne has mastered Chandler’s gift for metaphor (the Pacific Life reps “bared the teeth of friendly hyenas who have done their killing for the day”) and deepens Marlowe’s psyche as he responds to “a sad summons from the depths of own wasted past.” This is the perfect companion volume to The Annotated Big Sleep (reviewed on p. 46). Agent: Adam Eaglin, Cheney Agency.

August 1, 2018
Philip Marlowe returns, albeit in a rather superannuated hard-boiled form, in this novel commissioned by the Raymond Chandler estate.Osborne sets his novel in the late 1980s, when Marlowe is 72 and living in retirement in Mexico. He has one last case to solve, however, one that calls him "to a last effort, a final heroic statement." Pacific Mutual has recently paid $2 million on a policy for Donald Zinn, recently deceased, but the firm suspects it's being scammed and that Zinn and his "widow" are planning to live the high life in Mexico. Marlowe arranges to meet Dolores Zinn, and as one might expect, she's a generation younger than her husband and fatally attractive. Marlowe soon establishes that Zinn is indeed alive and has assumed the identity of one Paul Linder, who recently died under suspicious circumstances. Zinn is a vicious bully whose first impulse is to want to murder Marlowe to get him out of the way of his happy "retirement," but his wife instead tries to persuade the detective to accept a generous payment and forget about their scheme, for, after all, everyone wins if Marlowe simply reports to Pacific Mutual that he was unable to locate Zinn. Osborne is generally successful at ventriloquizing Chandler. The book features intriguing and shady characters, a convoluted and murky plot, and Marlowe's attempts to remain untainted in a world pervaded by violence and corruption. Adapting to the times, the detective now has "a small radio transmitter with bugging devices, a pair of opera glasses, and a subminiature Minox camera," but perhaps most startling is that he's traded in his .38 for a shikomizue, a razor-sharp sword hidden in his cane.While there are obvious perils in what Osborne attempts to do here, for the most part he succeeds in re-creating both a beloved character and a decadent ambience.

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July 1, 2018
Osborne is the third writer to have resurrected Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe (following Robert B. Parker and Benjamin Black), and his effort may be the best of the lot. Wisely electing not to re-create Chandler's iconic PI in his salad days, nor to imitate the author's simile-strewn style, Osborne gives us a retired Marlowe, 72 years old and living in Baja California ( a good place for an old man ) in the late 1980s; things change when two life-insurance agents turn up looking to hire Marlowe to investigate whether one Donald Zinn really drowned in Mexico as reported. Why Marlowe? Someone told the agents that, retired or no, he was the best man money couldn't buy. So Marlowe, like Tennyson's Ulysses, thinks he might have a go at one more round of striving and seeking. Naturally, what he finds in Mexico is a muddle (a true Chandlerian plot, beguiling in its absurd inexplicability) yet offering the detective plenty of opportunity to muse on the bitter pill of aging. Osborne's real triumph here is to create a new style for the septuagenarian Marlowe that seems absolutely right, less florid but even more driven by mordant wit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)