Farewell, My Lovely

The Original and the Best

No one wrote like Raymond Chandler. No one did it better. Even Hammett couldn't match Chandler's elegant turns of phrase and his ability to weave plot points together and somehow create a hard-boiled journey of the soul without ever descending into bathos. This should be required reading for American Literature along with The Big Sleep. Alas, there are a lot of pseudo-scholars who turn their noses up at Chandler, Hammett and the rest of the hard-boiled genre, which only makes them look like the class clowns. This is a classic.

Beautiful, but she wasn't lovely

Tough guy, hot woman that might leave you with a bullet lodged in your back, lies and double dealing all served up on a corrupt California landscape. Nasty guys and girls always get it in the end in a pulp fiction novel. Usually it is when you think they will get away with it.
R Hemingway

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Farewell, My Lovely

I'm kind of new to Raymond Chandler, this being the second book of his that I read (I plan to read all of his works in order, he's an excellent writer). And I have to say, I liked Farewell, My Lovely more than The Big Sleep. Not that The Big Sleep was bad, but having known Marlowe, I really enjoyed it the second time through. I always loved the hard-boiled dialogue and prose of the early 20th century and Chandler doesn't hold back at any time. Great characters, great mystery, and so much humor.

Soused P.I. Solves Case Inspite of Himself

A giant of an ex-con, bursting out of his costly, tasteless and ill-fitting clothes shows up at a nightclub one day, looking for his ex-girl, Velma, and takes Raymond Chandler's intrepid, wise-cracking detective, Philip Marlowe, along for a rather bumpy and dangerous ride, in this tale of crooked cops, gigolos, mediums, gamblers and gang betrayal. Moose Malloy is bigger then nearly everyone else and not overly bright but he is dead set on finding his Velma, last seen eight years before when Moose got turned into the cops for a bank job he pulled with some others. Marlowe witnesses Moose in action, while on a case, and gets sucked into the search for the big guy and his long lost honey by one cop while being warned off by another. But Marlowe is too bull-headed to do anything but keep pushing and, surprisingly, not particularly bright, since he keeps getting suckered and hit over the head and put at serious risk of his life. Situations he ought to see coming, as an experienced detective, he seems to persistently misread, perhaps because his liking for liquor has blurred his senses or maybe he just isn't a very good investigator. But, whatever the case, he stumbles on, from one life threatening situation to another. He also can't seem to get his arms around the fuzzy set of coincidences that follow hard on the heels of his run-in with Moose as he gets a job offer that anyone in his business with half a brain would walk away from . . . and then mishandles it badly. The seedy atmosphere of L.A. is very nicely done and the characters sharply limned and convincing, but the perpetually soused Marlowe, with the self-defeating wise-cracks and nasty mouth is a little tiresome. I had a bit of trouble acclimating myself to the racist mindset that Marlowe and his cohorts present in this 40's milieu, too, since I thought it was somewhat gratuitous and even mean-spirited, but maybe that's how some folks thought in those days. More troubling was my profound sense that Marlowe was just not bright enough, or slick enough, to be a half-decent private eye. He seems, in this book, to have a death-wish, a bad trait for someone who hires himself out as bodyguard and investigator. He takes chances a green kid shouldn't take and never seems to see the blackjack coming. Still, he manages to stumble along, thanks to a combination of apparently undeserved good luck and just plain hard-headedness, until the cause of all his troubles unfolds itself before his and our eyes. Surprisingly, given his drink-induced obtuseness, he solves the mysterious set of coincidences that have led to so much murder and betrayal, and gets the girl who wants him though he's too tough to ever openly acknowledge wanting her. This was a very odd detective tale and yet, for all its irritations and flaws, it kept me reading to a most satisfying conclusion that pretty much wraps the central problem up in an almost too-tight, neatly tied bow. Moose finds what he was looking for and Marlowe figures out how to find Moose and the killer of Marlowe's mysterious client is unmasked. Marlowe, of course, has another drink. -- SWM

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Entertaining Dialogue!

Farewell, My Lovely is one of the most entertaining books you will ever read! Chandler has created memorable characters and a engrossing plot in his best book (this is his opinion too). The book's snappy, witty dialogue is outstanding. It serves to make it my favorite read of all time.

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