It took me awhile before I was able to grasp what the story was all about. I was expecting this to be a noir but basically it was a like a Sherlock Holmes short story expanded to a novel. And for that reason, despite my failed expectation, I liked this book.

The language is quite old. This is because the setting is in Los Angeles during the 20's and the characters belong to the city's dark underworld, i.e., nightlife, crimes, drugs, murder. Racial discrimination is still rampant. The murder of a dead black man (the book still uses the "N" word, that's one reason I say the language is old) is brushed aside by the LAPD and is assigned to a lazy and incompetent investigator, Nulty. Our hero, Philip Marlowe is in the scene when the murder happened and so, being perhaps bored, he becomes interested in the case. The murder is committed by a huge black guy Moose Malloy who is looking for his girlfriend Velma Valento. To solve that crime, Marlowe tries to find Valento. Little does he know that his curiosity will lead him to a situation where his power of deduction ala-Sherlock Holmes will be needed.

I was not able to guess the ending. I never knew that Velma to Mrs. Grayle transformation. Not even when the older lady began to hit on him. So, that was the reason why Valento is barely described in the first half of the page. When Upon realizing that this was the case, I said: "Whaaat? Are you kidding me?" Then I went back to the first few pages and noticed that yes, there were very sketchy description of Velma Valento. Chandler really got me here.

My second Chandler and I liked this better than his The Long Goodbye (3 stars). This is faster-paced and the plot is more engaging.

I should read his The Big Sleep next.

Appena iniziata la lettura del romanzo è come se fossi salita in una macchina del tempo che mi ha riportato indietro a quelle scene dei film americani anni ’40, in bianco e nero, popolate da gangster elegantissimi con le scarpe a punta e il fazzoletto nel taschino, appena usciti da galera, da formose ballerine di night sul tipo di Jessica Rabbit, belle e gelide più del ghiaccio, da vecchie ubriacone prezzolate che sopravvivono arraggiandosi con ricatti, ma soprattutto da un detective privato, Philip Marlowe, rappresentato in copertina da un’illustrazione che mi ricorda Humprey Bogart –anche se fu Robert Mitchum ad impersonarlo al cinema- coraggioso e con una morale, uno che dice “mi piacciono le ragazze splendide e vistose, ciniche e cariche di peccati”, uno scorbutico che grugnisce di fronte a una ragazza che gli chiede di essere baciata.
Un bel viaggio nel tempo, non c’è che dire. Da assaporare lentamente, godendosi lo stile asciutto e l'ironia sottile di Raymond Chandler, maestro indiscusso del genere hard boiled.

In this his second adventure, private detective Philip Marlowe – more or less in between cases – pokes his inquisitive nose where it doesn’t belong. Encountering a behemoth of an ex-con, Moose Malloy, on the street, Marlowe follows the big man into a bar and witnesses a murder. And before the reader can ask, “Where’s my Velma?” – the question makes sense when you read the novel – Marlowe finds himself embroiled in police corruption, a blackmail scam, chasing a gang of jewelry thieves, another murder encounters a young female who becomes his pseudo-partner, meets up with a psychic con-man and a crooked doctor and is propositioned by a beautiful young woman who is married to a much older and very wealthy man. All the while Marlowe attempts to keep tabs on Moose.

If possible the plot/story-line of Farewell, My Lovely is even more convoluted than its predecessor, The Big Sleep. Marlowe meeting new players with each twist and turn of the investigation and getting physically bounced around on a regular basis. (For the politically correct there are a handful of racial slurs here which may make the reader cringe.) But somehow the author ties it all together in the end with maybe a not so neat bow.

This being a Chandler novel there are plenty of classic “Marlowe-isms”. After being called to a rich client’s home, where “the carpeting almost tickled his ankles”, he describes the den he is escorted into as “a room where anything could happen, except work.”

When embarking on a night’s work he makes the observation, “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”

Ahhhh – to be Philip Marlowe.

DNF @ 51%

I've had to read library loans on my phone app before, so that wasn't a huge turnoff, but it certainly didn't help factors when the plot was so nonsensical and boring, and the characters so unlikeable. And, of course, you can't overlook the casual racism. So. Much. Casual racism. Much more than I remember there being in the first book.

I saw in some other reviews that this story was cobbled together from three unrelated short stories that Chandler wrote, and it reads like it. It was jarring, often took sharp turns into unrelated nonsense out of nowhere, and even the way it starts - by Marlowe being pulled randomly into Moose Malloy's drunken drama while working another case, which is quickly forgotten (but hey, who needs paying customers when you can take a case no one asked you to look into for free?) - is as out there as most other things that happened in the first half I managed to read.

As for the casual racism, I've seen some comments in the reviews below trying to excuse it as "it was the times", and that's all that argument is: an excuse. We have racism today, and this wouldn't be acceptable from a modern day writer either. Marlowe is racist as hell. There are slurs in here I don't even recognize who they're targeting or what they mean, nor do I want to. It was bad enough the slurs I did recognize. The way Chandler has foreigners and Native Americans speaking doesn't reflect too well on him either. Women aren't viewed too kindly either, not even the one who is doing most of Marlowe's job for him.

The wit and humor from the first book is largely lacking as well. The writing is about the same, but some of the similes just seem excessively silly for no reason. Part of that is the noir genre, and part of that was trying to elude to something without saying it outright, like marijuana (always misspelled as marihuana). I thought constantly using "okey" instead of "okay" was bad enough. There were other random typos here and there too. And the number of times Marlowe gets conked on his head, I'm surprised he even remembers his own name much less anything else. Honestly, this guy should be in a coma. For everyone's sake.

But when it came down to it, when it comes to cynical, smart-mouthed gumshoes going on absurd mystery quests for no reason than to assuage their curiosity (and hopefully somehow get paid for it), I'd rather read Donald Strachey.

Down These Mean Streets

When you open up any dictionary and you look up the phrase Hardboiled private eye, you'll find it defined right there in black and white as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. If much of the book seems familiar, it may be that you read it many years ago or that so many of the motifs were borrowed and used by so many other private eye writers over the years. But if you want to know how it's really done, you return to the master Hardboiled craftsman himself.

I always picture Philip Marlowe as Humphrey Bogart and no one can ever shake that image from me. However, Bogart only played Marlowe in the film adaptation of the first book in the series, The Big Sleep. For Farewell, My Lovely, you get the film images of Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum many decades later.

But, you always get the mean streets of Los Angeles no matter how you picture Marlowe. These streets range from the seedy joints lining Central Avenue to the estates in Beverly Hills and Brentwood Heights. The streets lead of course to Chandler's fictional Bay City, loosely based on what was a crooked Santa Monica right down to the gambling boats three legal miles offshore.

Marlowe here is always quick with a quip but world-weary. He's seen it all a time or two and nothing necessarily surprises him except maybe getting knocked out when he's playing bodyguard or locked up and drug-addled in a sanitarium.

The very beginning of the novel sets the whole attitude as Marlowe nonchalantly accepts a great big ape of a guy, Moose Malloy, no less, throwing a guy bodily out if his way. Moose is a great character, a singleminded maniac returned to the street after eight years in the pen and determined to find his gal, Vera. Gil Brewer later created a whole novel about such a guy in A Killer Is Loose.

All the usual Hardboiled rackets are well-represented here from blackmail to fortune telling to crooked cops to payoffs to rich folks living in a different world. Through it all, Marlowe resolutely starts adding up all these things that just don't add up and couldn't possibly be related. But what makes it such a joy to read is the fantastic prose, the descriptions of people and places that just bring them to life, often with a sardonic humor.

More than sixty years and countless imitators later, Raymond Chandler's writing stands out brightly in the genre of crime fiction, as it remains obvious why he is still popular and influential today. His prose comes across as the text equivalent of a master blues guitarist's playing, having a fantastic well thought out rhythm and cadence to it even as it lapses into melancholy romanticism while still coming across as effortless and natural. Another apt comparison would be epic poetry meditating over the human condition's most desparate corners, disguised as the rambling monologue of a barroom drunk.

However, another reason the blues analogy is perhaps more useful would be the way Chandler structures the story of his novels. They follow less the linear-yet-convoluted plot structure of setting up and resolving mysteries as demonstrated by Chandler's contemporaries Dashiell Hammett and Georges Simenon, but feel more like literary riffing or jamming over a few central themes. That said, "Farewell My Lovely" strikes me as significantly more coherent and well-structured than the other novels I have read from the man, hence why I pick it as my no1 favourite of his books that I have read so far. (note that I have yet to read "The Little Sister" and "The Long Goodbye" which are several people's favourites) The plot follows philosophical private eye Philip Marlowe's quest to find the connections between two cases that appear unrelated at first, yet as he investigates both it becomes clearer and clearer that the lists of leads and suspects in both cases overlap: The first case involves an ex-con named Moose Malloy, an obvious prototype for Marv from Frank Miller's comic book series "Sin City", whose fiancee disappears without a trace while he's in jail; the other involves a shady businessman being anonymously blackmailed by a ring of jewel thieves on very strange terms.

Marlowe's investigation of those two cases leads him from ghettos and slums to luxurious mansions and resorts, as it brings him into contact with vast criminal conspiracies hidden underneath the surface of respected legal businesses, the public services ostensibly sworn to protect against such corruption and even the offices of psychic mediums. Despite this journey having a clearer narrative structure to it than the author's debut novel "The Big Sleep", most of the central clues Marlowe discovers and the investigation's methodological nuts-and-bolts are less important to the story than the meditations on the shadow sides of human nature and modern society as demonstrated by the characters and milieus described.

The important part is not the investigative A-to-B of how Marlowe uncovers that conspiracy. It's what the process tells him and the reader about how otherwise sympathetic people through no fault of their own end up on either the wrong side of the law or the wrong side of justice, how easily power corrupts, the breaking point where that corruption becomes utterly irredeemable even when it happens to the best of us, how everyone is in the end alienated and isolated from one another in the modern metropolis and last but not least how some people still manage to keep following their guiding higher principles and their true calling in the middle of all that. That core of romanticism, however jaded and pessimistic, is where I suspect that lyrical quality to the grim atmosphere of societal decay in Chandler's writing comes from and how he in a sense "earns" the darkness. The fact that the balancing act I described never rings false, or comes across as affected, is what I suspect is Chandler's true masterstroke.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A DETECTIVE HE IS GETTING BEAT UP A LOT

Philip Marlowe is one of the most memorable detectives in literary history. He’s smart, strong, handsome, but most of all witty and clever. And tough when he has to be. He’s also, seen more clearly by today’s standards, not admirable; he’s homophobic, at times seemingly racist, certainly arrogant with some women if not misogynist, with addictions to booze and cigarettes. Which is also to say that for 1940 he is in step with the times in the old US of A. So why is he still seen as one of the Big Three of all time in this genre? It’s the writing, at turns lyrical and then witty. Here’s just some examples:

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. She was wearing street clothes that looked black and white, and a hat to match and she was a little haughty, but not too much. Whatever you needed, wherever you happened to be—she had it.”

“I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”

“The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on. I went back to my desk, dropped the bottle of whiskey back into the drawer, shut the drawer and sat down again.”

“It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.”

“Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

“He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips.”

“Beyond the electroliers, beyond the beat and toot of the small sidewalk cars, beyond the smell of hot fat and popcorn and the shrill children and the barkers in the peep shows, beyond everything but the smell of the ocean and the suddenly clear line of the shore and the creaming fall of the waves into the pebbled spume. I walked almost alone now. The noises died behind me, the hot dishonest light became a fumbling glare. Then the lightless finger of a black pier jutted seaward into the dark. This would be the one. I turned to go out on it.”

See what I mean? This is what distinguishes him from other crime/noir writers. He’s entertaining and just plain good. But as with The Big Sleep, the plot is convoluted to the point where I won’t even recount it, except to say: a woman named Velma is never physically present in this book, but she is the figure that moves it forward, the thread in the fabric one has to pull to unravel the whole cloth of the plot. Such as it is.

What are key plot/character elements? A 7 foot tall guy named Moose Malloy. Corrupt Bay City cops (you expect an LA story to feature the corrupt LAPD, but here it spreads to a neighboring community, maybe a fictionally named Santa Monica?). Offshore gambling boats. At least three different villains, lots of hot dames, of course. But in the middle of it, you just have to (finally, I’ll say) fall in love with Marlowe, with his cynical patter. Not quite as great as The Big Sleep, but still a classic!

«Non è una storia né brillante né spiritosa. È soltanto una storia fosca e piena di sangue».

In una Los Angeles anni ’40 l’investigatore privato Philip Marlowe si trova casualmente presente sulla scena del crimine. In realtà, non dovrebbe esserci nulla d’interessante dato che la vittima è solo uno “scarafaggio”.

” Accese mezzo sigaro e gettò il cerino sul pavimento, dove già molti altri lo attendevano. La sua voce disse amaramente:
«Scarafaggi. Un'altra uccisione di scarafaggi. Ecco che cosa mi capita dopo diciotto anni di servizio. Niente taglia e niente stampa. Nemmeno due righe di cronaca».”

Così si designano nell’ambiente poliziesco gli afroamericani poiché proprio come gli scarafaggi sono esseri infimi non degni di rientrare nella cerchia umana. Un caso, pertanto, che appare di quart’ordine tanto che neppure la stampa si scomoda a scriverne un trafiletto. Di mezzo, però, c’è la scomparsa dell’affascinante Vilma e lei è bianca e di questo sì che vale la pena occuparsi.
Così si srotola una storia in cui Chandler dimostra una grande capacità descrittiva.
Nulla sfugge. Non c’è personaggio o ambiente che non sia tratteggiato nei minimi dettagli.
Tra descrizioni accurate di polsini, bottoni, rughe, pavimenti e quant’altro, c’è Marlowe.
Un duro, uno che non molla e si districa tra bugie e manganellate citando Shakespeare, facendo riferimenti a Rembrandt tanto per farci capire che non è l’ultimo dei caproni. Quello che stupisce è piuttosto come riesca a ricordarsene data la quantità industriale di whisky che ingurgita.
Un romanzo che, a mio avviso, non supera la prova del tempo sia per lo stile di scrittura sia per l’esplicito razzismo (oltre agli scarafaggi appare anche un indiano e la sua caratteristica principale è quella di puzzare e parlare come un troglodita…) ed una vena misogina. Tracce concrete di ciò che oggi designeremmo come politically incorrect .
Tre stelle per aver dato i natali al genere hard boiled dimostrando coraggio nel descrivere la corruzione morale in un’epoca di censure. Un autore amato come dimostrano commenti e votazioni dei lettori ma probabilmente non è il genere di lettura che mi manda in estasi.

«Siete fantastico», disse. «Così coraggioso, così risoluto, così disposto a lavorare per pochi quattrini. Tutti vi prendono a manganellate in testa, vi strangolano, vi spaccano la mascella e vi riempiono di morfina, ma voi continuate a tirar dritto come se niente fosse finché li avete fatti fuori tutti. Ma com'è che siete così straordinario?».

Raymond Chandler can't be beaten for hardboiled, noir, private eye stories!

There is reason Chandler is part of the Hardboiled Crime Trinity. This novel was perfect in pace, pitch, and plot. Sometimes you wonder if he is going to make a stretched metaphor stick, and he nails it just to spite you. This might not be a five-star novel in the house of novels, but in the bedroom of noir I haven't read many better.

n  “I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”n

Review for Trouble is My Business: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I know, Raymond Chandler and his Philip Marlowe series have a peerless place in the realm of hard boiled genre, even Mr. Haruki Murakami, my idol, is a huge fan of Mr. Chandler as well. but seriously Farewell, My Lovely is the only Marlowe's mystery among the total six or seven of the series that manages to stay in my mind.


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But what a crime mystery that is! The intensive plots and the final plot twist would leave you breathless, Mr. Chandler's characters are badass and hard boiled to the core; the atmosphere of nior is just perfect, absolutely perfect. Plus when I re-read this book, I absolutely love seeing the 1940s American society through the MC's eyes and I also noticed just how awesomely Mr. Chandler could write! It is highly stylish and cool, lacing with a vague dark sense of humor! If you wanted to read no-nonsense, punches-you-right-in-the-face book, try it out!


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