Review: Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel by Lawrence Osborne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“I just wanted one last outing. Every man does. One last play at the tables - it’s a common wish.”

I approached this, Lawrence Osborne’s, Chandler Estate-authorised, Philip Marlowe novel, with some trepidation and a little scepticism. Raymond Chandler is my favourite writer and ‘The Little Sister’ the first ‘crime’ novel I remember reading. But Osborne’s decision to write about a 72-year old Marlowe was intriguing and, to some extent, prevents the novel from becoming pastiche, keeps it from being just an inferior continuation of what Chandler did so well. In fact, it adds another dimension to the character.

It is 1988. Philip Marlowe is retired, living physically in Mexico and mentally in the past, detesting old age. So, when an insurance company approaches him about a suspected fraud, he is quick to accept the challenge despite the reservations of others.

‘“You have a good life, Philip. You’re too old to knock people out. Stay down there and go fishing. They can’t be offering you that much. Or maybe you’re just bored.”
“There’s that. I never thought retirement would be so sad.”’

A young widow has been awarded a huge benefit on the death of her much older husband whose rapid cremation following his drowning off the Mexican coast has raised the insurers’ suspicions. As Marlowe begins to investigate we sense that his aim is not really to find answers but to recapture the thrill of past cases. Osborne’s take on Marlowe is not Chandler - it really couldn’t be - but he does echo Chandler’s language without trying to compete and delivers a thoroughly enjoyable, if very sad, novel. Sad because Marlowe cannot recapture the life he had thirty, forty years ago. He finds himself falling for the widow but knows it will not be reciprocated. He drinks and suffers for it where before he would shrug it off. He continues to try to live the life of a tough guy despite knowing that it might kill him.

‘Years of this kind of life wears you down and makes you porous. You die off bit by bit. the stale grit of the road gets into your unconscious, a small voice arises and says to you, “This is the last time, there won’t be any more awakenings and thank god for that, eh?”’

I really liked this book despite my initial misgivings. Osborne makes great use of the Mexican locations he obviously knows well. He finds the dreamlike, slightly unreal quality that Chandler was so good at. But the knight errant is jaded, filled with regret, and chivalry is not so easy to maintain. If this is the end of Philip Marlowe, and it probably should be, it is a fitting end.

‘My dreams were of ships in gales, decks swept by relentless waves, and the threat of being lost at sea. Waters rushed past me and the ship heaved and sank; the bottom of the ocean clamoured with falling coins, glasses and sextants, and cocktail shakers. And there I drifted down among them until I came to rest upon a vast bed of silver and sand and fell asleep like a capsized bosun filled with water and salt.’

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