Philip Marlowe / Only to Sleep

One

Just below the old spanish mission, a few miles north of Ensenada in Baja, I have the house that I bought from Larry Danish in 1984. There I live as an old gumshoe or jelly bean should, with my middle-aged maid, Maria, and a stray dog rescued from the garbage. Out at sea, the porpoises that never sleep. La Mision had been Larry's exile for decades. He built a Spanish-style villa perched on the rocks within sight of the old La Fonda Hotel and Bar, where, it is rumored by the staff, the margarita was invented during Rita Hayworth's many fiestas at that same establishment. It doesn't matter if it isn't true. But I too had known La Fonda, La Mision's only hotel, for years. I used to drive down here in the '50s, when it was still beautiful, before the world was turned into a silo of unsatisfactory teenage fantasies and a garbage dumpster of schemes. Before the SunCor corporation littered the coast with golf resorts and there was any such thing as spring break in Rosarito Beach. Back then I'd go there to lie on a bed in a dark room and dry out. By the '70s, I was still drying out and no longer noticed whole decades passing in the night.

The cliffs of teddy bear cholla remain. The lonely hot roads in the interior and the little churches with their tin-painted retablos of car accidents and death by cancer. The Pacific with lines of kelp, chilling waves rolling in to a beach between rock headlands shrouded with mist and spray. This is what all of California once looked like. Close your eyes and wonder. I often do. How easy it was to destroy, easier than destroying a cherry cake with a plastic fork. All for a bit of tin.

But it's a good place for an old man. A sanctuary of clean wind and two hundred days of sun. On weekends I played the casinos in Ensenada. There was a bar there called Porfirio's, I think, which had a machine on the counter called El Electrucador. It was a kind of Van de Graaff generator with two finger pads. You put your fingers on the pads and

LAWRENCE OSBORNE was born in England but has traveled and lived all over the world. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, Hunters in the Dark, and Beautiful Animals. He is the third writer, after John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black) and Robert B. Parker, to be asked by the Raymond Chandler Estate to write a new Philip Marlowe novel. In Only to Sleep, Osborne draws from his time working as a reporter on the Mexican border in the early 1990s. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, Forbes, Harper's, and other publications. He lives in Bangkok.

New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice
New York Post's Must-Read Books of the Week

'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.' - New York Times Book Review

'Only to Sleep admirably sidesteps the pitfalls of Chandler-esque pastiche... in its place, a Marlowe we at once know, but have never met before. As much a meditation on aging and memory as it is a crime thriller.' - LA Times

'Brilliant... Osborne and Chandler are a perfect match.' - William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart and Solo: A James Bond Novel

'Only to Sleep is a story about age and regret and murder. About the American Dream. About The Mexican Dream. It's the kind of book where, when you read it, it turns the world to black and white for a half-hour afterward. It leaves you with the taste of rum and blood in your mouth. It hangs with you like a scar.' - NPR

'Whether you want a believably resurrected Chandler book or simply a good novel, this is for you.' - Washington Times

'Osborne succeeds brilliantly... [he] captures the dreamlike quality of the original Marlowe novels.' - Washington Post

'Absorbing...semi-exotic, lushly described... a fine way to leave an old fictional friend, taking at last a well-earned rest in the sun after having given readers decades of pleasure.' - Wall Street Journal

'Osborne is the third writer to have resurrected Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and his effort may be the best of the lot.' - Booklist

'A fresh perspective on one of the classic hard-boiled detective.' - Library Journal

'A joy... If you like noir, pour yourself something cool and enjoy one final dark night of the soul.' - Joseph Knox, author of Sirens

'Lawrence Osborne is one of the most interesting authors at writing today. He has taken a Chandlerian plot, filtered it through the mind of an autumnal Philip Marlowe, and