Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne

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.

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Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne

Published in Great Britain in 2015; published by Crown Publishing/Hogarth on January 12, 2016

Hunters in the dark are hunting for happiness or advantage. They are in the dark because they don’t know exactly what they are hunting.

Robert Grieve, a British teacher on his summer vacation, crosses the border from Thailand to Cambodia and has a run of luck in a casino. His luck changes when he meets an American named Simon Beauchamp. Robert ignores his driver’s warning to decline Simon’s invitation to stay at his home. Suffice it to say that Robert experiences a life-changing event, or at least he chooses to respond to the event by changing his life.

After making his way to Phnom Penh, Robert takes a job tutoring a physician’s daughter in English. To get the gig, he adopts a new identity and tells a series of elaborate lies. The temptation to disappear into a new life, at least for a while, seems impossible to resist. Thus Robert becomes a hunter in the dark.

People who drift through life often drift into trouble, or at least that’s a standard message that thrillers deliver. The plot follows Robert as he drifts from one problem to another, ultimately caused by identity confusion that he brings upon himself. Unlike the reader, he usually seems oblivious to lurking dangers. His only goal is to live an unexamined life. The reader experiences tension on Robert’s behalf as events begin to shape a future that looks bleak for the aimless teacher.

Additional characters are slowly introduced during the first half, each experiencing or contributing to the novel’s undercurrent of misfortune. Acts of violence and corruption tie the story threads together. Characters generally have a believable balance of good and bad. Like real people, some are mostly good, others are mostly bad, but none are purely one or the other.

The descriptions of Phnom Penh, with its varied Asian foods, motodops and tuk tuks, give the novel a rich atmosphere. Cambodian characters provide the reader with snippets of the country’s history which, like all histories, has its share of ugly moments. I love the perspectives of the Cambodian characters who have little use for crusading westerners (particularly Hollywood actresses who pose for the cameras while making impassioned speeches about child slavery before returning to their yachts). However well-intentioned they might be, they have little understanding of the culture and zero opportunity to influence it by a few days of posturing, a comfortable break from the extravagance of their western lives.

Hunters in the Dark is ultimately a story of karma. Although “what goes around, comes around” for many of the characters, the plot is not predictable. It is easy to believe despite its improbability, and Robert, although clueless, is easy to care about.

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