Another year, another Marlowe reread. I read Farewell, My Lovely (1939) (Philip Marlowe #2) within days of finishing the first novel The Big Sleep. I've never read them in order before. Whilst I preferred the writing in The Big Sleep, I now realise that the plot is far more satisfying in this book. After the epic and mythical quest comes the more prosaic world of corruption as two seemingly unconnected plotlines gradually start to converge.

Raymond Chandler's writing is always a delight but in this outing Marlowe encounters some truly memorable characters, not least the man moutain Moose Malloy.

Chandler's hard boiled fiction is still as fresh and modern as the day his Marlowe novels were first published. It's only the casual racism and sexism of his era which jars.

5/5






Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.

Best-known as the creator of the original private eye, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, and he is widely regarded as one of the very greatest writers of detective fiction.

Oh, man, do I love me some Raymond Chandler. If I had a dime for every time the prose in this book rocked me on my heels, I'd have enough for a cup of coffee. (And not a cheapo 1940 cup of coffee, either. Something that came out of a polished chrome machine, with a name ending in "-cino".)

Although this is only the second Philip Marlowe novel, it's nearly the last for me. Each Marlowe novel is a gem, a delightful little gem, but Chandler only wrote 7 of them (not counting short story collections, and not counting Poodle Springs, which was completed by Robert B. Parker many years after Chandler's death). What can a fan do, but ration them? That's what I did. But still... 7 books don't last very long. Not when the writing is so damn good:

"...he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."

"Then he smiled. He was doing an awful lot of smiling that day. Using up a whole week's supply."

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

Well, who doesn't?

Having read all the "core" Marlowe novels now, I'd say that Chandler plotted like a kid sticking Legos together. (And I say that with love, because goddamn could that man string words together.) He had a set number of blocks, and he sort of rearranged them from book to book. Most books don't use all of Chandler's Legos, but every book uses several of them. But Farewell, My Lovely uses the entire set:

Does Marlowe get sapped? Check. (Twice!)

Does Marlowe get drugged? Check.

Does Marlowe get beat up? Check.

Does Marlowe find a dead body? Duh.

Is there mistaken identity? Check.

Does Marlowe confront a gangster? Check.

Does Marlowe crack wise with the bulls? Check?

Double-crosses? Check.

Crooked cops? Hell yeah.

Sexual innuendo? Yep, in a 1940 sort of way.

Sexism? Yes.

Racism? Unfortunately, yes. A product of its time or not, I'm knocking the book down a couple of stars. This should have been a 5-star book, but come ON, Chandler.

Does Marlowe find the killer? YES.

This one even hits the trifecta when it comes to Chandler's characterization of women:

Gorgeous sexpot hiding a heart of ice? She's here.

The cute virgin, fiesty and puppyish? Present and accounted for.

The wretched harridan? Passed out on the bed over there.

I'm not making a great case for the Marlowe novels here. But they are simply fantastic. He's one of the great iconic private eyes, the shop-soiled Galahad. I think Anne Riordan put it best in this book when she said:

You're so marvelous... So brave, so determined and you work for so little money. Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackle and end until they're all worn out. What makes you so wonderful?

She answered her own question there, didn't she? But if she wanted another answer I'd tell her the plain truth: the prose makes him wonderful. But I share her wonderment. Because that's exactly how I feel about Marlowe.

Also? This book is awesome because, if for no other reason, it features a character named, "Moose Malloy." How is that not fun?

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler is vintage crime pulp fiction at its noir best.

Philip Marlowe’s involvement with three dangerous and deceptive women (Mrs. Florian- blowsy and tragic; Anne, innocent; and Mrs. Grayle- who turns out to be the villain) and complete with drug induced hallucination/poisoning and terrifying night scenes- it’s the standard for an existentialist America of the post war era- of pain, truth, lust and hurt.

It’s an unforgettable labyrinth into an America that is as raw and dirty as it comes. The classic film starring Robert Mitchum, Charlotte Rampling and Sylvia Miles is also excellent with its gorgeous score.

Fabulous! Philip Marlowe is the man! He gets quite knocked about in this story, which was good enough for me not to guess what was going on until I was told. And that is good enough for me!

Anne, a side kick character in this story sums up the story and Marlowe like this:

You’re so marvellous,’ she said. ‘So brave, so determined, and you work for so little money. Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackle and end until they’re all worn out. What makes you so wonderful?’

Unfortunately for her, she isn't his type:

‘I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin.’

I love Marlowes ability to bounce back. He is totally the dude!

'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.'

Chandler has such a way with words!
'She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.'
There's also a lot of beautiful landscape prose which can get missed and his attention to detail (or maybe Marlowe's) is impressive. There is a scene where he watches a little bug moving round the office and it's really quite funny and observant.

It's dated -largely in a cool way. Nowadays attitudes are different but there is racism, referring to overly groomed men as pansies, the way women are thought of and described- these are historically accurate now and were contemporary at the time of writing. Everyone chain smokes and is practically alcoholic too.

I love Chandler's writing and I have a black and white movie visual going on the whole way through. I see Humphrey Bogart slugging whisky in his office, then delivering his wise-cracking one liners.

Superbly escapist and wonderful way to spend a few hours of my weekend!

“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.”

While working a missing persons case, Detective Philip Marlowe finds himself drawn into a murder investigation. Jailbird Moose Malloy knocks off the proprietor of a local watering hole in his pursuit of a gal named Velma. While assisting the cops in hunting him down, Marlowe backs off the case when he realizes he won’t be paid for his efforts. However it’s not long before another job falls in his lap when Marlowe is hired to accompany a man in a money-for-jewelry trade off. When his employer is tucked in for the big sleep, Marlowe tries to piece the crime together, taking a few lumps in the process.

As abrasive as a sheet of sandpaper coated in shattered glass, Philip Marlowe isn’t one to check his attitude at the door. He’s also an alcoholic, a racist, and unapologetically hardheaded. With all these character flaws, why is Raymond Chandler’s signature series so damn enjoyable? It probably has something to do with Chandler’s endlessly quotable prose.

The backbone of any story worth reading is the way the author’s prose plays out on the page. You could have the most exciting plot imaginable but if the writing isn't up to snuff, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, but sometimes an author can be so good that the plot is almost secondary. The true joy can come from random musings about life, death and everything in between or even the exceptional way an author crafts a setting or describes a character. Raymond Chandler is one such author and while the case surrounding Farewell, My Lovely isn't particularly outstanding, he is certainly a masterful storyteller.

Throughout the story, Chandler takes the reader in a multitude of directions and when Marlowe makes any sort of headway, a new element is introduced thus changing the case. It’s often a wonder Marlowe gets anything done when half the time he’s soaking himself in bourbon while seemingly trying to burn bridges with his smarmy attitude and general distaste for anyone he meets.

Farewell, My Lovely is an excellent novel and a more than worthy follow up to The Big Sleep. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is one hell of an interesting character leaving me sad to know there are only six books in the series.

Also posted @ Every Read Thing

"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."

I'm gonna admit right up front that the fourth star of my rating comes entirely from Raymond Chandler and his way with words. Nobody knew how to turn a phrase like good old Ray-Ray. I mean, what a guy. What a kick he must have been at parties.

I don't normally read books for language alone. I'm an emotional reader, and my emotions tend to be tickled by character development and plot rather than language, and I'm a sucker for a well-turned phrase in service of plot or character. But Raymond Chandler's books I really couldn't care less about character or plot. With him, it's all about atmosphere, and despite the dark seedy underbelly exposed in his books, his sense of diction is so playful. Just take a look at this gorgeous passage. It's so simple, but so full of attitude:

"The call had come at 10:08. Marriott had talked maybe two minutes. Another four had got us out of the house. Time passes very slowly when you are actually doing something. I mean, you can go through a lot of movements in very few minutes. Is that what I mean? What the hell do I care what I mean? Okay, better men than me have meant less. Okay, what I mean is, that would be 10:15, say. The place was about twelve minutes away. 10:27. I get out, walk down in the hollow, spend at the most eight minutes fooling around and come on back up to get my head treated. 10:35. Give me a minute to fall down and hit the ground with my face. The reason I hit it with my face, I got my chin scraped. It hurts. It feels scraped. That way I know it’s scraped. No, I can’t see it. I don’t have to see it. It’s my chin and I know whether it’s scraped or not. Maybe you want to make something of it. Okay, shut up and let me think."

I mean, come on! I was going to try and imitate his writing for this review, but I just don't have that kind of sass in me. Who calls getting banged on the head "getting my head treated"? I don't know. There's just something about it that makes me laugh.

And the plot in this one is extra discombobulated because Chandler cannibalized three separate short stories he'd already written and reworked them into one story. so it's like he's got three separate things going on with very little to connect them: a story about a very large man just released from prison who Marlowe witnesses killing a black man in a night club, and who the police are looking for; the search for a night club singer that used to work in the night club, but hasn't been seen for eight years; and a story about a psychic who also deals in organized crime, and has bought off sections of the police force. But still, he makes it work because what he's concentrating on is the writing and the characters, not the details of the plot. He's like a magician waving his hands and getting you to look at one thing, and forget the other exists.

I highly recommend the Philip Marlowe audiobooks, specifically the version narrated by Elliott Gould. His voice is absolutely perfect for Marlowe, and he nails the deadpan tone of the thing.

First time I've read any Chandler in a while. The plot is a mess and reads like two or three short stories mashed together, but in a way it works - Philip Marlowe is just muddling through events as most of us do. There's something about jewelry, "broads", and crooked cops, and somehow it's all tied up with an ending that's quietly tragic.

But what I most remember is Chandler's gift for metaphor, and it's become almost a stand-in for a lot of noir fiction and the best I can do is just provide quotes:

"I was a gilt-edged sap come back from a vain adventure. I was a hundred dollar package of dynamite that went off with a noise like a pawnbroker looking at a dollar watch. I was a pink-headed bug crawling up the side of the City Hall. I was asleep."

"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 cake."

"The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on."

And, of course, "A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."

This is a novel written entirely in atmosphere. It's hard to overstate just how important the narrative voice is to the overall experience of hardboiled novels, and nowhere is it more apparent than here. The language is all description and colour and texture, smells and heat, sounds, light, dark, dust, smoke, and none of it is wasted.

There's hardly a line that isn't shaded with some level of wit, wisecrack, quip, wry observation. Marlow is a man who spends as much time thinking about how to spin his bad luck as he does about the next whisky he's going to drink. Other characters comment on it constantly: this isn't a world where everyone cracks wise. He's an oddity to the people around him.

People can call this cynicism, but that's not the right word. A guy who tells you on the first page, 'It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home. I never found him, but Mrs Aleidis never paid me any money either' isn't cynical, he's what the cynics might call a realist. He takes life as it comes. His observations aren't even that negative. It's almost philosophical.

It took me a chapter or so to settle into this intensity of language. At first I thought he was laying it on so thick it felt like a farce, with lines like he looked about as incospicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food pulling me up with the outsized force of their imagery. But as Marlowe travels on, casually investigating a lead on a case he witnessed for not much more reason than he feels like it, he begins to describe his encounters, and the language starts to stretch out like elastic:

n  'I'm afraid I don't like your manner,' he said, using the edge of his voice.
'I've had complaints about it,' I said.n

Marlowe is a surprisingly sensitive narrator. He lets us into his head with remarkably little dissembling, covering his fear with humour during scenes of high tension (I didn't jump more than a foot. The flash in my hand went out. A gun slid into my hand all by itself) but leaving us in no doubt as to his real feelings.

Every person he describes leaks a little of his own personality out in the telling. Sometimes he has no respect for them (He leaned back and hooked his thumbs into his vest, which made him look a little more like a cop, but didn't make him look any more magnetic), and sometimes he's outright turned on (It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window), but every time he's honest. Chandler's brilliance is in making honesty look tarnished enough to be believable, sexy, and a little bit tragic.

Witness the penultimate sequence, where Marlowe sneaks onto a casino boat to face up to a crime boss with the help of a man he met on the docks only a few minutes before. Marlowe by this point has been sapped, drugged, and socked so many times it's remarkable he's still walking, and this is the experience of a man near the end of his tether. He has met many men and a few women over the course of this knotty investigation, and all of them have been described with care and attention, but nobody gets the same amount of attention that Red gets over the course of a couple of chapters:

n  His voice was soft, dreamy, so delicate for a big man that it was startling... He had the eyes you never see, that you only read about. Violet eyes. Almost purple. Eyes like a girl, a lovely girl. His skin was as soft as silk. Lightly reddened, but it would never tan. It was too delicate... 'Put your dough away,' Red said. 'You paid me for the trip back. I think you're scared.' He took hold of my hand. His was strong, hard, warm and slightly sticky. 'I know you're scared,' he whispered.n

There's a simmering feel of sexuality, of attraction and desire, to a lot of the narration, and it ramps up heavily at this final stage. Sure, Marlowe's exhausted and afraid and making some very bad choices by this point, but all it does is make him more open than ever to the potential of the people he meets. He goes to talk to people when he should by all rights walk away. He sizes them up and gets sized up in return. He takes needless risks because he can't bear not knowing. This whole thing started because he saw a big man staring at a neon sign and followed him inside the bar out of curiosity. What it boils down to is this: Marlowe's defining characteristic isn't wisecracking or whisky, it's hunger.

In Farewell, My Lovely, Chandler's second novel, the activity opens with Marlowe researching an ordinary missing-individual's case. Amid his interest, Marlowe discovers something much all the more intriguing inside and out. He experiences Moose Molloy, a major bruiser simply out of prison and vigilant for his previous love, Velma. The scene is Florian's, an 'eat and dice emporium', a place where Velma filled in as a vocalist at the season of Moose's conviction nearly eight years back. Before he knows it, Marlowe is ideal smack dab in the middle; Moose, who doesn't appear to know his own particular quality, winds up breaking the block administrator's neck and heads off with a firearm leaving Marlowe to get drawn into the examination.

Farewell, My Lovely (Philip Marlowe, #2), Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1940, the second novel he wrote featuring the Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. It was adapted for the screen three times and was also adapted for the stage and radio. Private detective Philip Marlowe is investigating a dead-end missing person case when he sees a felon, Moose Malloy, barging into a nightclub called Florian's, looking for his ex-girlfriend Velma Valento. The club has changed owners, so no one now there knows her. Malloy ends up killing the black owner of the club and escaping.

The murder case is assigned to Lt. Nulty, a Los Angeles Police detective who has no interest in the murder of a black man. Marlowe advises Nulty to look for Malloy's girlfriend, but Nulty prefers to let Marlowe do the routine legwork and rely on finding Malloy based on his huge size and loud clothes. Marlowe decides to follow up and look for the girl. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هفدهم ماه مارس سال2017میلادی

عنوان: بدرود محبوبم (خداحافظ زیبای من)؛ نویسنده: ریموند چندلر؛ مترجم: موژان چگینی؛ تهران، نشر چترنگ، سال1395؛ در290ص؛ شابک9786008066484؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

بدرود، محبوبم عنوان رمانی پلیسی، جنایی نوشته «ریموند چندلر» است که نخستین بار در سال1940میلادی منتشر شد، با اقتباس از این کتاب سه فیلم سینمایی ساخته شده است؛ کارآگاه «فلیپ مارلو» به دنبال شوهر گمشده ی یک زن است؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 17/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 23/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

This is the third book in the Marlowe series that I am reading. And I must admit that I understand why it is so popular. There is an undeniable charm to these stories.

First of all, Marlowe himself has his own specific charm, which also results from the fact that he is a completely unreal character. He is a tough guy who, against all odds, strives for justice as he understands it. No woman is immune to his allure. And the number of times someone tries to kill or beats him is almost absurd. And yet he works great as the main character of the series and has become a model for other similar characters.

I think I liked the plot of this book the least of those I've read, which does not mean that it was a bad book. But I think the plot is rather complicated and it is not necessary. There are several threads here that, at one point or another, connect and intersect. There are also a lot of characters, although fortunately they are quite easy to distinguish. Even if determining who played what role in this story is a little more difficult. And that's what I mean when I say this story is unnecessarily complicated. Of course, the final answers to the whole story turn out to be very simple.

Despite what I wrote above, I had a lot of fun reading this book. Marlowe is the main character you want to follow through this story. It always seemed to me that he was one step ahead of me, that he saw something that I did not notice. And while that wasn't always true, it felt good.

You don't get much better that a story set in classic LA in the 1940s with Phillip Marlow and Farewell, My Lovely has it all. The private eye gives rein to his curiosity and entered a black bar and comes out with an ex-con on the lookout for a torch singer named Velma. Soon, Marlow is looking for the woman as well.

Along the way Marlow gets involved with a whole host of shady characters, and physically, he comes out on the short end. Despite it all, however, he manages to stay focused and eventually, solves not only the mystery of the torch singer but a couple of murders and the clean up of a small town. If its all in a day's work for the PI, its darn good good reading for the reader. This writing never gets old and the tale is always welcome.