MARLOWE REBORN

Novel channels Chander hero while avoiding pitfalls of slavish imitation

Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlow Novel Lawrence Osborne Hogarth

As only the third author Raymond Chandler’s estate has authorized to write a Philip Marlowe novel, Lawrence Osborne says, in his postscript to his novel, the task was “perilous.”

He’s got that right. After all, even crime fiction legend Robert B. Parker wasn’t up to it, producing two Marlowe novels that are best forgotten.

But Osborne succeeds brilliantly, largely by sidestepping the temptation to mimic Chandler’s idiosyncratic style and by making no attempt to re-create the swaggering private detective who outsmarted cops and mobsters in the celebrated author’s seven novels and short stories set in Los Angeles in the 1930s to ’50s.

Instead, Osborne imagines a melancholy, 72-year-old Marlowe living out his final years in solitude in a Baja Mexico fishing village in the 1980s. Gone is the gumshoe who taunted cops with wisecracks, manhandled gangsters and bedded debutantes. Osborne’s Marlowe is too worldweary, and too lame, for that sort of thing, and he no longer turns a pretty girl’s head.

Osborne also wisely avoids setting his story in Los Angeles, knowing that the city it had become by the 1980s scarcely resembled the mean streets Marlowe once famously stalked.

The new tale opens when two insurance investigators track down Marlowe in Mexico. Their company had paid off on a huge life insurance policy, but they now think the supposed victim of a Mexico boating accident may be alive. Could Marlowe, with his knowledge of the country, lend a hand?

Marlowe agrees, relishing the chance to get back into the game one last time. He sets off in pursuit, dragging his bum leg the length and breadth of Mexico, the author portraying its mountain roads, desert villages, squalid slums and ostentatious villas.

Osborne stays true to Chandler’s vision in two respects: He uses a lot of similes, and the plot of Only to Sleep (the title an echo of Chandler’s The Big Sleep) captures the dreamlike quality of the original Marlowe novels.