Only To Sleep

Philip Marlowe, like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, is a character that won't die, even if their creators are long expired. Lawrence Osborne is the third authorized writer to continue gumshoe Marlowe's story, this time in Only To Sleep, which sees Marlowe at 72, in 1988, living in Mexico.

Marlowe is living in retirement, but is approached by an insurance company. A wealthy man has died, drowning in an accident, and they've just paid out a huge policy. They want Marlowe to investigate. Thus begins his odyssey from the Salton Sea area of California through several towns of Mexico. Like The Long Goodbye, the plot involves a person faking his own death, but Marlowe is willing to take a payoff to keep quiet.

The first thing that struck me about Only To Sleep is that Osborne doesn't try to out-Chandler Raymond Chandler. There are not a lot of similes in the book, although certainly there a few: "In the green light we looked like two aging chimps eating scraps in a cave." But the writing is much more concerned with the prose than with the story--we get the reveal pretty early, and then most of the book is Marlowe traveling from one place to another, without seeming to know or understand what he wants to do. For a private eye book, that's a strange tack to take.

It's also weird to think of Marlowe, who lives in our imagination from films in black and white, living in 1988, mentioning Guns 'N' Roses, Tina Turner, and The Official Preppy Handbook. Since he's an old man, there isn't the action one might expect from a younger man, although he does carry a cane that contains a sword inside, and it is put to use.

Only To Sleep is less a mystery novel than a meditation on aging and mortality, with lovely passages like: "Seventy-two isn’t a bad age, but sixty-two is too old to be working. You are just impersonating the man you used to be. Retirement had seemed like the best way not to die, but the adrenaline had gone the day I threw in the towel and it never returned. You have your books and your movies, your daydreams and your moments in the sun, but none of those can save you any more than irony can."

I will also admit that the last scene totally baffled me. Marlowe is talking to a character and I have no idea who he is, and I get that this is a big reveal. So if you want to read a mystery, you might want to took elsewhere.