I was unfamiliar with Lawrence Osborne, once very familiar with Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe. Here, the two come together, Osborne having been commissioned by the copyright owners to write a Marlowe continuation novel, alongside the better-known John Banville and Robert B Parker.
Osborne does it very well. He takes the latest possible birth date for Marlowe and has him as a septuagenarian in the late 1980s, living in retirement in Mexico. He is contacted by an insurance company who want him to investigate the death of wealthy US socialite Donald Zinn who recently turned up drowned on a Mexico beach. Suspicions have been raised because Zinn's widow Dolores is very much younger and now very much richer.
The insurance company makes Marlowe a generous offer. He thinks, one last payday, a sort of farewell tour of Southern California and other parts of Mexico. Where's the harm?
Marlowe soon finds out. This is 1988, after all, the age of new money, wealth-worship and mega con-tricks. Is Zinn one of them? To what extent is the beautiful Dolores - a Chandleresque siren if ever there was one - involved? What other murky forces are in play?
Osborne lived on the US-Mexico border around this time and worked as a reporter. He knows exactly the world he is describing and does it beautifully, without copying Chandler's style but deploying all the key tropes. Like the best Chandler, the ending is not fully resolved, because these things never are, and because leaving the reader speculating is the best way to go. I for one was spellbound all the way through.
PS: Banville's continuation Marlowe is Black-Eyed Blonde, written under his Benjamin Black alias and reviewed on this blog way back in 2014.
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