Only To Sleep - Lawrence Osborne - Lawrence Osborne

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.

The Border - Don Winslow

Winslow - back on top form. Brilliant.

The Border concludes the Cartel trilogy and brings it bang up to date. Art Keller emerges from the Guatemalan jungle to take over as head of the DEA, having realised that the only way to tackle America's drug problem is to take out the big money men. That doesn't just mean the Cartel bosses, because Keller now knows there are people above them on the US end of the chain. For the Cartels drugs mean money and power. For the financiers power can be bought by money. And now they plan to buy the ultimate power.

Meanwhile, the fact that Keller has finally taken out Adan Barrera, head of the Sinaloan Cartel and effective boss of bosses, means that the second tier go to war to determine a successor. The lack of order means there are vacuums for figures from the past to return to: men like Rafael Caro, who tortured and murdered Keller's partner thirty years ago, and Eddie Ruiz who was there when Keller took out Adan.

It is a big, BIG story, and rightly so. In so many ways it is the story of our time, the fifty year war on drugs which America has not and will never win. How close Winslow's fiction comes to reality will be open to debate. What is inarguable, a stone fact, is that nobody does this story better than Don Winslow. Does anybody else even dare to try? Each of the three novels - The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, and now The Border - is a major achievement. The three together are a landmark.

The Power of the Dog - Don Winslow

Don Winslow is a bit like James Ellroy. He writes dark crime in short, pared-down sentences. He depicts the underbelly of the American Dream in which corruption is the only currency. Unlike Ellroy, he keeps his conspiracy theories just this side of psychosis.


The Power of the Dog (2005) is perhaps his most ambitious novel. It took him six years to write and Winslow prides himself on productivity. It spans thirty years in the war on drugs seen through the eyes of three main characters, Art Keller, DEA agent, Adan Barrera, drug trafficker, and Sean Callan, Irish mobster turned mafia hitman. Over the years they find themselves in alliances and opposition. Linking them is high-class prostitute Nora Hayden and a broad cast of second-string characters including Tio Barrera, founder of the Mexican drug cartel, Jimmy Peaches Picone, would-be mafia boss, and Sal Scachi, colonel, hitman, the ultimate fixer. And many, many more.


Too many characters? Too much plot? On balance, no. Sometimes, as you work through the 500+ pages, you wonder, is this getting us anywhere? Does this character contribute anything to the whole? But you keep going and find out that, yes, everything contributes, every character serves a purpose. Plotting is Winslow's dominant skill. He writes well - very well - but holds back from launching into the sort of obscene purple prose that curdles Ellroy's later work. The dialogue is spot on - each character has a distinct voice, and the principals also have individual inner voices.


Did I love this book? No - you can't love a book this dark. Is it brilliant? Does it achieve what it sets out to do? Does it make me want to seek out more of Winslow's extensive catalogue, like for example Savages (2010) which Winslow turned into the script for Oliver Stone's best film in years? Yes, yes, and yes. Apparently there are half-a-dozen Neal Carey mysteries, plus standalone novels including The Death and Life of Bobby Z, The Winter of Frankie Machine, and The Kings of Cool. I mean, the titles alone are enough to spark my interest.