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.

Robert B Parker's Payback - Mike Lupica

 Lupica has continued Parker's series about Boston PI Sunny Randall. Parker himself only wrote six of these and what was impressive to me was the depth of the backstory here.  Sunny Randall is connected to the Boston Irish mob through her ex-husband, the Boston Irish cops through her father.  Her wingman Spike is a gay restauranteur.  And the current man in her life is - yes, it's Jesse Stone, perhaps because by the time Payback came out in 2021 Mike Lupica was also writing the Jesse Stone continuation series.

I admit female PIs are not always my first choice for recreational reading, but I took to Sunny straight away.  Lupica has a way with characterisation through dialogue and internal monologue that is very persuasive.

The story here is international money-laundering, Russian mobsters, high stakes poker and frat boy hedge funds - all set against a background of the Covid 19 pandemic.  And, just in passing, while others write novels about the pandemic, Lupica has the skills to make it simply the background.  Because of the pandemic, chancers and gamblers are running out of money and have to take risks, robbing Peter to pay Paul - or, more appropriate in this case, Pyotr and Sergei.

There is bags of action, three interconnected lines of investigation and lots of vivid images of the Boston setting.  I enjoyed it hugely.