In Just to dream, Philip Marlowe is already over 70 years old and lives in a secluded villa in Mexico, enjoying his retirement. He maintains the good looks of another time, dresses elegantly, smokes lazily and leans on a cane that hides a sharp samurai blade in its sheath. Even so, the detective misses the old moments: he feels strong and he likes money. What would not give for a last case!

In real life, that gray-headed and arthritis-ready Marlowe would continue to drink lemonades under his awning, but in fiction the wishes come true, and then the client arrives: an insurance company who suspects the ruse of a widow whose husband , also an old man, has appeared drowned on a nearby beach. However, there is no body to collate the official version: the body has been cremated in a hurry. Is Mr. Zinn really dead, or is he all a clever screen for collecting a million dollar policy?

The starting point could well be that of a novel by Raymond Chandler, the true creator of Marlowe. But Chandler passed away in 1959, having published his seventh novel with the lead detective, Playback , and leaving a draft of the next, The Poodle Springs Story, while his character was trapped in a limbo of which he has reappeared, from the hand of others, occasionally punctual, as Hercules Poirot or Sherlock Holmes also reappeared : the apocrypha of Marlowe have been signed by authors such as Robert B. Parker, Benjamin Black and now, for this last dance, Lawrence Osborne , the American novelist currently based in Thailand that has delivered some of the most vibrant psychological thrillers of the last decade, still a semi-unknown in the Spanish market.

"I received a message without prior notice from Chandler's heirs and the family of Graham Greene, who owns part of the rights to the work," Osborne explains from Bangkok. "Greene's nephew had read some of my novels and wrote to see if I was interested in getting the character back. At first I said no, and then I changed my mind." In the final note to Just for Dreaming, Osborne confesses to being an early admirer of Raymond Chandler, so his reaction was more out of over-responsibility than lack of knowledge. "But I asked if I could age Marlowe and set the story in Mexico in 1990 [it was finally in 1987], which is when I lived there. At first they did not see it clearly, but they accepted. I did not want to make a literary pastiche, but root the story in my own experience. "

It should be said that Osborne is not a typical crime novel author. In his work of fiction, composed for now of five titles -two of them already translated into Spanish, Cazadores en la noche and Los perdonados , both at the Gatopardo publishing house; his next novel in english, the glass kingdom - will appear in august , accidental deaths, scams, cheating, cheating in the game abound, always as a premise to articulate a deep moral conflict that, as he explains, is resolved many times from the unwritten laws of karma. But he started as a journalist in the service of great Anglo-Saxon publications such as the New York Times or Vogue , writing about wine, psychiatry and travel. His literature has emanated from a frenetic and hedonistic life, and his idea of ​​the novel noir has more to do with movement than with tension.

In March, just when the state of alarm was declared, Gatopardo published Los perdonados, the novel with which Osborne closed his period as a journalist -he decided when he settled in Bangkok and discovered that he could live without stress for $ 600 a month- , and with which he restarted his career as a pure novelist, at the service of complex subjects and with prose as delicate in the descriptions as dry in moments of voltage. The Forgiven bravely tackles the clash of civilizations: a British couple, rich and amoral, run over a young Maghrebi in Morocco. Will they be brave enough to ask for forgiveness, and will the family have the capacity to forgive the unfaithful?

That book started a great streak in the life of Osborne, now in his sixties, and it goes further: several of his books will be transformed into a movie - in The Forgiven, he will have Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain -, and also at some point Just to dream , where Osborne ventures that his Marlowe will have the features of Liam Neeson to embody that twilight Marlowe who pursues ghosts in a blurred Mexico where, of course, those tempting women appear -a personal turn from Osborne of the classic black widow- who put test your manhood on the decline. Today's crime novel, like yesterday's, that staged the last greeting of the great American detective.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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