By Lawrence Osborne
The New York Times
20 September 2018
In 2016 the great London agent Ed Victor, and the equally formidable Graham C. Greene, a nephew of the novelist, asked me if I would consider writing a sequel to the Philip Marlowe novels that have periodically appeared since Raymond Chandler’s death in 1959. The offer, as you might expect, was gentlemanly. Robert B. Parker and the novelist John Banville would be my only predecessors, having between them published three Marlowe novels between 1988 and the present. The sequels began with Parker’s “Poodle Springs,” a completion of Chandler’s last novel, then continued with the same author’s “Perchance to Dream,” in 1991, and culminated with Banville’s “The Black Eyed Blonde,” published under his pen name Benjamin Black in 2014. I was told that I could do more or less whatever I wanted — within reason. But what was within reason?
My first impulse was to turn the offer down. I revere Banville as a stylist, not to mention Chandler himself, and it seemed hazardous to try to compete with both of them at the same time. I surely couldn’t win that one. Apart from anything else, fans of both would probably be propelled into a tediously predictable state of ire. So what was the upside? There was vanity, of course; and then there was curiosity, the demon that killed the cat. So far, so treacherous. But there were also possibilities. I wrote back to the Chandler estate to ask whether its executors might consider my making Marlowe old, alone and desolately marooned in the year 1988. Would it fly with them, or indeed with Chandler’s fans? Would they mind seeing him in the age of Ronald Reagan and Slash?
I thought to myself that before accepting I would write 40 pages set in Baja in 1988 and see if the resulting Marlowe-in-dotage gave off the delicious sparks that a character must generate if his creator is to stay the course. If the pages worked, I’d accept the commission and stand by the decision. Presented with the whole novel, they could then see if I had wasted my time, and theirs. It was not a small gamble.
But to begin with it was an exercise, a speculative ventriloquy. The cadences of Chandler, the inner world of his knight-errant (a thinly disguised version of the hero knight of Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur”), the quick-stepping wisecracks and beautifully compressed metaphors — all of this could be echoed in some way. But tricks of that kind are bound to weary a reader looking, as all readers do, for authenticity of voice. Little by little, something else has to happen. In the end, you’re condemned to write your own book. A pastiche or historical period piece would never have worked for me anyway. As Salvador Dalí used to say: “Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
In 2016 the great London agent Ed Victor, and the equally formidable Graham C. Greene, a nephew of the novelist, asked me if I would consider writing a sequel to the Philip Marlowe novels that have periodically appeared since Raymond Chandler’s death in 1959. The offer, as you might expect, was gentlemanly. Robert B. Parker and the novelist John Banville would be my only predecessors, having between them published three Marlowe novels between 1988 and the present. The sequels began with Parker’s “Poodle Springs,” a completion of Chandler’s last novel, then continued with the same author’s “Perchance to Dream,” in 1991, and culminated with Banville’s “The Black Eyed Blonde,” published under his pen name Benjamin Black in 2014. I was told that I could do more or less whatever I wanted — within reason. But what was within reason?
My first impulse was to turn the offer down. I revere Banville as a stylist, not to mention Chandler himself, and it seemed hazardous to try to compete with both of them at the same time. I surely couldn’t win that one. Apart from anything else, fans of both would probably be propelled into a tediously predictable state of ire. So what was the upside? There was vanity, of course; and then there was curiosity, the demon that killed the cat. So far, so treacherous. But there were also possibilities. I wrote back to the Chandler estate to ask whether its executors might consider my making Marlowe old, alone and desolately marooned in the year 1988. Would it fly with them, or indeed with Chandler’s fans? Would they mind seeing him in the age of Ronald Reagan and Slash?
I thought to myself that before accepting I would write 40 pages set in Baja in 1988 and see if the resulting Marlowe-in-dotage gave off the delicious sparks that a character must generate if his creator is to stay the course. If the pages worked, I’d accept the commission and stand by the decision. Presented with the whole novel, they could then see if I had wasted my time, and theirs. It was not a small gamble.
But to begin with it was an exercise, a speculative ventriloquy. The cadences of Chandler, the inner world of his knight-errant (a thinly disguised version of the hero knight of Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur”), the quick-stepping wisecracks and beautifully compressed metaphors — all of this could be echoed in some way. But tricks of that kind are bound to weary a reader looking, as all readers do, for authenticity of voice. Little by little, something else has to happen. In the end, you’re condemned to write your own book. A pastiche or historical period piece would never have worked for me anyway. As Salvador Dalí used to say: “Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
James Garner as the eponymous detective in Marlowe (1969)
I had worked as a small-time reporter on the United States-Mexico border at about that time. Not as a gumshoe, but not dissimilar. The paper was The San Diego Reader. When I arrived there from England, inexperienced, arrogant, penniless, I had no idea where I was. For my first assignment I was sent to the Sycuan Indian casino in El Cajon, where I won $2,000 on the Crazy Bow Tie bingo game televised live from Oklahoma City. It was larger than any check I had ever received from a publisher in London, and I began to wonder if California was really where I was meant to be. Among the books stacked in my 1940s Hillcrest apartment were the seven Chandler novels, which I repeatedly reread because they now seemed so much less fantastical. Above, the shrill blue sky of our little nightmares; below, the San Diego canyons among which Chandler was now buried.
Thereafter I was dispatched to places like Mexicali, Sonoyta and Tijuana to report on illegal immigration, local crime and the occasional lucha libre wrestling tournament. Then further afield to Mexico City to take the coyote buses that leave from the Terminal Central to the northern border. I learned Spanish, and moved to Baja for a while. But inevitably things went south in more metaphorical ways.
On one assignment I was sent to do a nocturnal police ride-along in the gang-infested desert town of El Centro, right on the border, a place straight out of “Touch of Evil.” I misspelled the name of a cinema over whose roof I reported clambering with a rookie cop while holding his shotgun, and the mayor hauled me in for a blistering rebuke, after which I was fired for misrepresenting “the community.” I think it was fair enough. I also now had a setting that I would never use creatively until Ed Victor made his call: the landscapes of the Anza-Borrego, the half-dead settlements of the Salton Sea, where occasionally I reported stories of con men or real-estate shenanigans, and, of course, the long mapless journeys by bus around Mexico that never had a logical beginning or end.
The Hotel Portales in Colima, the Salton Sea and the saloon bars of El Centro and Mazatlán: These were flyblown places that all remained internally fossilized. But with the excuse of a genre outing, an impersonation of another writer, I found these places suddenly liberated from their bedrock. Far from being an impersonal pastiche of a distant time, my Marlowe novel, “Only to Sleep,” became, during the writing, an act of memoir. Those places came back to life.
What I remembered most from those years on the road was the absoluteness of the loneliness. Every day you wash up alone in some bar or restaurant and take your beer among strangers, talking insanely to yourself, looking out on to squares and streets you don’t know, and then the following day you climb into a bus going somewhere you haven’t yet quite figured out and move in to another bar and restaurant with the same beer and the same flies and the same strangers. I used to think it was a particular kind of madness to which I was prone. But you can’t spend so much time doing what I did for no reason. It must answer a yearning that has no prospectus. All this passed into my Marlowe.
The following year, after the book was finished, I was invited to the Italian home of several of the descendants of Graham Greene, who today manage much of the Chandler estate (a complicated family history entwines the Chandler and Greene families). Alexander Greene and his stepsister, Charlotte Horton, make a magnificent wine in the estate surrounding their Castello di Potentino in the wild hills south of Montalcino. I took the proofs of my book with me to work on during the day, and in my lofty room overlooking the vineyards, I lay in bed dressed in a set of Graham Greene’s brightly striped pajamas, given to me by the family. They fit perfectly, which made me wonder how Raymond Chandler’s pajamas would have fit. Did the family have some of those too? Would they have been too small, would they have been striped? I never learned.
I was surprised by how little I remembered writing any of “Only to Sleep.” Had it come out so automatically, without the usual torments, as if channeled not by the ghost of a dead American writer but by the ghost of my own failed and pathless younger self? Apparently so. Places I had forgotten suddenly alive again in a single paragraph, as if written under hypnosis — the aging Marlowe, stumbling and melancholic, wandering through rooms and streets that only I had stumbled through. You could say that the greatest danger of accepting such a commission is the hubris of the later writer pointlessly emulating the great one before him, and it would be true. But there is also the unexpected deviation, the tale that wouldn’t have happened otherwise — and also, if I may dare to say, the voice that would have remained buried.
Lawrence Osborne’s latest novel, “Only to Sleep,” came out in July.
I really enjoyed this. It's respectful and evokes Chandler without trying to shoehorn in Chandler-lite similes at every opportunity (a sure sign of imitation rather than good writing). There's also a real touch of Graham Greene to it.
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