The Best Hardboiled Novel Ever?
Review of the Random House Audio audiobook (2021) narrated by Scott Brick of the original Alfred A. Knopf hardcover edition Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

[5 rating, especially for the narration performance in the audiobook]

"But this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down."
"A gag," I said. "An old, old gag."
"Who is this Hemingway person at all?"
"A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good."
"That must take a hell of a long time," the big man said. - dialogue excerpt from Chapter 24 of Farewell, My Lovely

I've read Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely several times. The first time was probably as early as 1975, since I still own a copy of the Robert Mitchum movie tie-in edition Farewell, My Lovely. I still find new dialogue and metaphors to enjoy though, such as the above exchange between a heavy-handed cop whom Marlowe keeps calling Hemingway for no apparent reason. Hemingway wasn't offended by the swipe at his early Gertrude Stein influenced repetition style though. He called Chandler the only detective novelist worth reading.

Audible recently made this 2021 audiobook edition a $5 Special Offer and I snapped it up immediately as it has the great veteran audiobook narrator Scott Brick as its reader. I then discovered that there is an entire 2021 Raymond Chandler / Philip Marlowe series narrated by Brick, so I'm bound to get a few more of them in the future. They share the cover art with the 1988 Vintage Crime / Black Lizard paperbacks, presumably due to a Random House umbrella tie-in.

Farewell, My Lovely was formed by Chandler recycling 3 of his earlier short stories. These come together very well unlike some later Chandler books where plot points sometimes remained unresolved. It is the atmosphere and characterization that is the key draw and the actual solving of the crimes is almost secondary.

As expected, the narration by Scott Brick was excellent. Chapter intermissions were highlighted by the use of film noir-like music to heighten the atmosphere.

Other Reviews
The DetNovel.com summary via Web.Archive details the plot (Spoilers Obviously) but is excellent for explaining several literary allusions in Chandler's metaphors.

Trivia and Links
Farewell, My Lovely has been adapted three times for film, although the early versions did not use the book's title. The 1975 version directed by Dick Richards had Robert Mitchum in the Philip Marlowe role and a trailer can be seen here and the entire film here. This version, although reasonably faithful overall, has an increased level of gunfights, making it seem like more of a mob movie.

The 1944 version was released under the title Murder My Sweet dir. Edward Emytryk with Dick Powell in the Philip Marlowe role. A trailer can be seen here.

The 1942 version used the Raymond Chandler plot and adapted it as the 3rd outing for actor George Sanders' series character The Falcon in The Falcon Take Over dir. Irving Reis. I did not find a trailer for it.

Phillip Marlowe is one of the most famous and influential characters in detective fiction. He’s also a racist alcoholic, and after all the blows to the head he routinely takes, he’s almost certainly suffering from post-concussion syndrome so you gotta question his judgment.

But he’s also the guy that says things like this:

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."

And this:

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

And this:

”" 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.”

So I always find myself making allowances for Marlowe’s bad habits and personal failings.

Marlowe is working a boring job trying to find a missing husband when he has the bad luck to come across Moose Malloy. Malloy is a giant hulk of a man who just got out of prison and is looking for his lost love, Velma. Unfortunately, Moose is kind of simple and doesn’t know his own strength so he ends up killing somebody when asking questions. As a witness, Marlowe tells the cops what he saw and is coerced into trying to find Velma by a lazy detective. However, a real paying job as a bodyguard for a guy delivering a ransom for the return of stolen jewelry comes up so Marlowe ditches the Malloy mess. But things don’t go quite as expected.

One of the better Chandler novels, this is pretty typical Marlowe. The plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s not really important. It’s all about atmosphere and attitude. If you can get past the casual racism that litters the early chapters, you’ll find one of the classics of noir fiction.

What could be better than listening to Elliot Gould read a Philip Marlowe mystery?! He was the perfect narrator to match Chandler's tough guy noir classic. I loved the rat-a-tat writing, whether actual dialog or Marlowe's first person description of the action. So many quotable lines, I'm not even going to try! Creating atmosphere is what Chandler is all about and he completely transports the reader to 1940's Los Angeles's seamier side. There was so much going on that, at times, I lost the thread, but that was only a minor irritation. The ending brought everything together and made the chaos of what preceded make sense.

If the book had been written today, I would have felt it to be derivative, but this is one of the originals from which noir is derived! And if it had been written today, the view of and language used about Negroes, Italians, Mexicans and Jews would put me off for sure. But it wasn't written today and spending some time in 1940's LA made reading this book a treat. And did I mention Elliot Gould was brilliant?