By Lawrence Osborne
256 pp. Hogarth. $26.
256 pp. Hogarth. $26.
By Laura Lippman
The New York Times
17 July 2018
My stepson had read all of J. R. R. Tolkien by age 10, even “The Silmarillion.” Mourning for a world in which there were no more hobbits to follow, he tried to write his own adventure for Tolkien’s characters. I understood the impulse; as a teenager, I wrote short stories based on a relatively obscure novel that had managed to inspire a film and a short-lived television show. (This novel is named in a document in my safe deposit box and will be revealed at my funeral service.) Almost every reader has known this desire for more. The results have ranged from the“Oz” sequels to “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
When these stories emerge from the genre known as fan fiction — noncommissioned, uploaded to the internet for anyone to enjoy — they’re frequently derided. But a fan’s notes are rooted in a passion seldom matched by the authorized versions. The latter, even if better crafted, have a hard time escaping that cash register ka-ching pinging beneath each word. Estates also err on the side of caution. The keepers of the“Gone With the Wind” flame authorized “Scarlett” and fought “The Wind Done Gone”; surely, it should have been the other way around.
The best plan is to find fans-in-waiting, writers with genuine passion and encyclopedic knowledge; Ace Atkins, recruited by Robert B. Parker’s heirs for the continuation of the Spenser series, is a good example. Parker, as it happens, was scouted by the estate of Raymond Chandler to finish a Philip Marlowe book (“Poodle Springs”) and write an additional one(“Perchance to Dream”). Then, as in a fairy tale, the kingdom fell silent for many years. Four years ago, John Banville, albeit under the name of his crime-writing alter ego, Benjamin Black, published “The Black-Eyed Blonde.” Now Lawrence Osborne, an accomplished writer of fiction and nonfiction, has been asked to imagine a new case for Philip Marlowe and — have a smell from the barrel, all you gunsels and able grables — it crackles.
I approached the book as wary as a — forget it, I’m not going to succumb to the urge to match Chandler’s (and now Osborne’s) signature similes. The setup is brisk and disarming. The year is 1988 and Marlowe is a retiree in Mexico — Baja California, which, at the end of the Reagan era, is “what all of California once looked like.” His days are routine, although part of the routine is rather odd. On weekends, he frequents a bar with a machine called El Electrucador — put your fingers on the pad, withstand the shock and get a free shot of mezcal. “I figured the shocks were doing my intestines and hair roots some good. People said I looked much younger when I came back from my weekends. They said I looked ‘returned from the dead.’ At my age, I’ll take any compliment.”
Oh, and he walks with a silver-tipped cane, a cane that hides a blade worthy of the Bride in “Kill Bill.” Do I really need to tell you to keep an eye on that cane?
Weekends in Ensenada’s casinos, weekdays at a hotel called La Fonda, playing cards and eating roast suckling pig — this has been Marlowe’s life for almost a decade. Then two insurance men “dressed like undertakers” walk into La Fonda’s terrace bar. They’ve been told that Marlowe is the “best that money couldn’t buy.” An American named Donald Zinn has died under mysterious circumstances in a remote coastal village, leaving $2 million to his much-younger wife. The insurance men think there might be mitigating circumstances that could affect the payout.
Zinn and his wife, Dolores, had been drowning in debt from bad real estate investments. Surprise, surprise, the widow is gorgeous — and possibly lethal. “She had the level interest in something new that a leopard has. While it decides whether you can be killed or not, its eyes are remarkably gentle and serene.” Still, Marlowe is instantly smitten. He fantasizes about whisking her around a dance floor, preferably to “Begin the Beguine.”
And this is where Osborne comes into his own, only 20 pages in. Dames once literally fell for Marlowe; consider Carmen Sternwood in “The Big Sleep,” collapsing into his arms within minutes of meeting him. She was still doing a variation on this shtick in the 1978 screen version, when Marlowe was played by a careworn Robert Mitchum only a few years out from collecting Social Security. But Osborne’s Marlowe is finished with the romance game, and he knows it. He’s frankly envious that the 71-year-old dead man, so near his age, “had gotten to lie next to this beauty night after night, like Gandhi among his Nereids.”
The best P.I. stories build slowly and keep the stakes relatively small. Osborne, who worked as a reporter along the border in the early 1990s, knows Mexico well and he passes that knowledge along to Marlowe. The former private investigator quickly establishes that the dead man on the beach might not have been Donald Zinn, but some poor patsy with Zinn’s ID. The game is afoot, with just the right amount of reversals and double-crosses. If certain moments seem illogical — well, that too is part of the Chandler oeuvre.
The book’s greatest suspense centers on Osborne’s fealty to Chandler’s Marlowe, especially in the description set out in Chandler’s 1950 essay,“The Simple Art of Murder.” The key passage begins, rather famously: “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” It continues at great length, delineating the man’s — always a man’s, forever a man’s — sexual habits (“neither a eunuch nor a satyr”), his way of speaking, his code.
Chandler was doing what writers often do, making a case for his own brand of art — while taking potshots at writers who did it differently, such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. As someone who has written P.I. fiction, I don’t always subscribe to Chandler’s dictates, particularly his assertion that “in everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.” So I’m wide open to Osborne’s version of Marlowe, which forces us to wonder at times whether he’s still a man of honor.
He’s definitely a man still full of similes and metaphors — about women, the weather, the color of the skies in the dusty Mexican towns he visits. When “Perchance to Dream” was released, Martin Amis, writing in these pages, argued that most readers couldn’t spot the difference between Chandler’s and Parker’s rhetorical flourishes — both had written too many duds. I believe Chandler simply fell back on those flourishes too often, resulting in a low winning percentage. Osborne does it slightly better, although I would still prune a few. (Dolores’s eyes are also likened to “the shiftiness of a vagrant, the ever-moving pupil that reminds you of an apple bobbing in dirty water.” Man, that’s one hard-boiled Halloween party.)
But this is a quibble with a novel that exceeded my expectations, a gripe as petty as —
Naw, I’m still not going to risk it.
17 July 2018
My stepson had read all of J. R. R. Tolkien by age 10, even “The Silmarillion.” Mourning for a world in which there were no more hobbits to follow, he tried to write his own adventure for Tolkien’s characters. I understood the impulse; as a teenager, I wrote short stories based on a relatively obscure novel that had managed to inspire a film and a short-lived television show. (This novel is named in a document in my safe deposit box and will be revealed at my funeral service.) Almost every reader has known this desire for more. The results have ranged from the“Oz” sequels to “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
When these stories emerge from the genre known as fan fiction — noncommissioned, uploaded to the internet for anyone to enjoy — they’re frequently derided. But a fan’s notes are rooted in a passion seldom matched by the authorized versions. The latter, even if better crafted, have a hard time escaping that cash register ka-ching pinging beneath each word. Estates also err on the side of caution. The keepers of the“Gone With the Wind” flame authorized “Scarlett” and fought “The Wind Done Gone”; surely, it should have been the other way around.
The best plan is to find fans-in-waiting, writers with genuine passion and encyclopedic knowledge; Ace Atkins, recruited by Robert B. Parker’s heirs for the continuation of the Spenser series, is a good example. Parker, as it happens, was scouted by the estate of Raymond Chandler to finish a Philip Marlowe book (“Poodle Springs”) and write an additional one(“Perchance to Dream”). Then, as in a fairy tale, the kingdom fell silent for many years. Four years ago, John Banville, albeit under the name of his crime-writing alter ego, Benjamin Black, published “The Black-Eyed Blonde.” Now Lawrence Osborne, an accomplished writer of fiction and nonfiction, has been asked to imagine a new case for Philip Marlowe and — have a smell from the barrel, all you gunsels and able grables — it crackles.
I approached the book as wary as a — forget it, I’m not going to succumb to the urge to match Chandler’s (and now Osborne’s) signature similes. The setup is brisk and disarming. The year is 1988 and Marlowe is a retiree in Mexico — Baja California, which, at the end of the Reagan era, is “what all of California once looked like.” His days are routine, although part of the routine is rather odd. On weekends, he frequents a bar with a machine called El Electrucador — put your fingers on the pad, withstand the shock and get a free shot of mezcal. “I figured the shocks were doing my intestines and hair roots some good. People said I looked much younger when I came back from my weekends. They said I looked ‘returned from the dead.’ At my age, I’ll take any compliment.”
Oh, and he walks with a silver-tipped cane, a cane that hides a blade worthy of the Bride in “Kill Bill.” Do I really need to tell you to keep an eye on that cane?
Weekends in Ensenada’s casinos, weekdays at a hotel called La Fonda, playing cards and eating roast suckling pig — this has been Marlowe’s life for almost a decade. Then two insurance men “dressed like undertakers” walk into La Fonda’s terrace bar. They’ve been told that Marlowe is the “best that money couldn’t buy.” An American named Donald Zinn has died under mysterious circumstances in a remote coastal village, leaving $2 million to his much-younger wife. The insurance men think there might be mitigating circumstances that could affect the payout.
Zinn and his wife, Dolores, had been drowning in debt from bad real estate investments. Surprise, surprise, the widow is gorgeous — and possibly lethal. “She had the level interest in something new that a leopard has. While it decides whether you can be killed or not, its eyes are remarkably gentle and serene.” Still, Marlowe is instantly smitten. He fantasizes about whisking her around a dance floor, preferably to “Begin the Beguine.”
And this is where Osborne comes into his own, only 20 pages in. Dames once literally fell for Marlowe; consider Carmen Sternwood in “The Big Sleep,” collapsing into his arms within minutes of meeting him. She was still doing a variation on this shtick in the 1978 screen version, when Marlowe was played by a careworn Robert Mitchum only a few years out from collecting Social Security. But Osborne’s Marlowe is finished with the romance game, and he knows it. He’s frankly envious that the 71-year-old dead man, so near his age, “had gotten to lie next to this beauty night after night, like Gandhi among his Nereids.”
The best P.I. stories build slowly and keep the stakes relatively small. Osborne, who worked as a reporter along the border in the early 1990s, knows Mexico well and he passes that knowledge along to Marlowe. The former private investigator quickly establishes that the dead man on the beach might not have been Donald Zinn, but some poor patsy with Zinn’s ID. The game is afoot, with just the right amount of reversals and double-crosses. If certain moments seem illogical — well, that too is part of the Chandler oeuvre.
The book’s greatest suspense centers on Osborne’s fealty to Chandler’s Marlowe, especially in the description set out in Chandler’s 1950 essay,“The Simple Art of Murder.” The key passage begins, rather famously: “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” It continues at great length, delineating the man’s — always a man’s, forever a man’s — sexual habits (“neither a eunuch nor a satyr”), his way of speaking, his code.
Chandler was doing what writers often do, making a case for his own brand of art — while taking potshots at writers who did it differently, such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. As someone who has written P.I. fiction, I don’t always subscribe to Chandler’s dictates, particularly his assertion that “in everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.” So I’m wide open to Osborne’s version of Marlowe, which forces us to wonder at times whether he’s still a man of honor.
He’s definitely a man still full of similes and metaphors — about women, the weather, the color of the skies in the dusty Mexican towns he visits. When “Perchance to Dream” was released, Martin Amis, writing in these pages, argued that most readers couldn’t spot the difference between Chandler’s and Parker’s rhetorical flourishes — both had written too many duds. I believe Chandler simply fell back on those flourishes too often, resulting in a low winning percentage. Osborne does it slightly better, although I would still prune a few. (Dolores’s eyes are also likened to “the shiftiness of a vagrant, the ever-moving pupil that reminds you of an apple bobbing in dirty water.” Man, that’s one hard-boiled Halloween party.)
But this is a quibble with a novel that exceeded my expectations, a gripe as petty as —
Naw, I’m still not going to risk it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/books/review/only-to-sleep-lawrence-osborne.html
Laura Lippman’s most recent novel is “Sunburn.”
Laura Lippman’s most recent novel is “Sunburn.”
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