Lawrence Osborne was the third writer commissioned by the estate of Raymond Chandler to write a Philip Marlowe continuation novel and Only to Sleep was published in 2018.
The brilliant idea here is that it is 1988, the tail-end of the Reagan era, and Marlowe is seventy-two, retired and living in the part of Mexico that is just south of California. When an insurance company in San Diego approaches him to investigate a claim, he can’t resist accepting the case; one last job to stave off the boredom and inertia of retirement.
It’s the sort of mystery familiar from Marlowe’s earlier career. Wealthy property developer Donald Zinn has died in Mexico and his Mexican widow is making a claim on the life insurance. The company suspect it may be a fraud and that Zinn is still alive. Marlowe is despatched to Mexico to find out the truth.
Marlowe is not quite what he was, though. That’s hardly a surprise given the hard living that was depicted in Chandler’s books. He has got his drinking just about under control, but tends to have strange dreams. He has a limp because of arthritis and walks with the aid of a cane. It’s suggested that he is impotent now. Something of what he was remains though, because the cane is actually a swordstick. His determination and quick wits in a sticky situation are still intact, too. So is that moral sense, the feeling that in the end he will do the right thing because he can’t help it.
Marlowe laments the way the world has changed, and what he sees as debased modern tastes in clothes and music. He remains a suit-and-tie man, fond of the old jazz songs. As much as a detective story, this is a meditation on the passage of time, ageing and retirement, and facing up to mortality.
Pretty soon the plot turns into a pursuit of a man who may or may not be Zinn. There’s a hint that Zinn is a sort of sinister double of Marlowe, being another retiree yet married to a Mexican woman half his age. It has the same dream-like feel of never quite coming into focus that you find in Raymond Chandler’s books. This is reflected in the title, taken from an Aztec song: “We come here only to dream/We come only to sleep”.
The real main character of this book is Mexico, described with such vividness that you have to read quite slowly to take in the precise, descriptive prose. Osborne is also a travel writer, after all, and catches the bright light and colour of Mexico. He has reproduced the distinctive tone of Marlowe’s first-person narration, but also subtly adapted it. Marlowe is as observant as ever, but the setting is Mexico, not Los Angeles. He is older and a bit gloomier.
Once again Marlowe is on a quest, a road trip from hotel room to hotel room as he goes further south into Mexico and further from America in every sense. Much as the book recalls Chandler, it also reminded me quite strongly of Patricia Highsmith. I am thinking of those tales of American expatriates adrift in Greece or North Africa where dollars will buy a lot of things not available at home. There’s also a hint of F Scott Fitzgerald in a rather sinister Gatsbyesque masked party.
This is that rare thing, a continuation novel that is based on the work of another writer yet stands up on its own as work of fiction. I don’t think you have to have read Raymond Chandler to get a lot out of Only to Sleep.
The Good Reader 