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An Aging Philip Marlowe Returns In 'Only To Sleep'
Lawrence Osborne's new Marlowe novel brings us a version of the gumshoe in his 70s, lonely and slow, looking into another mysterious death. It's a book that seems simple, but hides cavernous depths.
How odd it is to step into another writer's shoes. To pull on the suit of his most famous character and dance around in it for a little while. You gotta have a reason to do something like that. You've gotta be, for lack of a better word, invested.
Lawrence Osborne has done some amazing things with words. He's made a hard, sharp name for himself doing his own thing â telling morally gray and existentially terrifying tales about men and women loose in the world's far places, and merciless, personal nonfiction. But with he has borrowed the style of Raymond Chandler and the body of Philip Marlowe. "A perilous thing," he says of such literary necromancy in his author's note. And he's right.
