Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Farewell, My Lovely
by Raymond Chandler
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Philip Marlowe #2
Publication Date: January 1, 1940
Genre: noir
Pages: 304
ReRead?: No
Project: summer of noir

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.

The second book in Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series begins with a coincidental encounter between Marlowe and Moose Malloy, who has just been released from a stint in the Oregon State Penetentiary, where he did time for robbery. He is back in L.A., looking for his lady love, Velma, who used to be a torch singer, and for revenge on whoever it was who sold him out to the police.

He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show hankerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them. 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.

Marlowe is there, checking out Florian, which used to be a white night club but has been taken over by the black community (Chandler uses a number of words for this community which are both unfamiliar and unquestionably offensive, and which I will not repeat herein) for someone he never finds. Moose, who has been out of the area for a while, struggles to understand that no one knows Velma or her whereabouts. Things end badly.

And this is how Marlowe ends up in the middle of a rather confusing case that involves, at various points, corrupt police, a psychic who seems to engaged in some decidedly non-psychic behaviors, a doctor who may or may not be distributing heroin, a spunky, red-headed Irish gal whose father was a police man, illegal gambling taking place far enough off shore that no one really cares about it, and the very beautiful wife of a very old, very rich man. And murder. Quite a lot of murder.

Once again, Chandler wields language like a scalpel. Or an angel.

It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn’t see water from the front of the place. Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.

This was the first time reading that I noticed Chandler making what appear to be references to other writers – Dr. Fell (I assume John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell) and Philo Vance both get a mention. He also refers to on of the police officers as “Hemingway.”

This book is packed full of striking sentences and paragraphs. No one else writes like Chandler, although it seems like so many writers have been trying to ape his style, generally to less than positive effect, in the decades since. It’s amazing that he wrote only 6 novels (I don’t think that Playback really counts. I never see anyone talking about it. I guess I’ll find out), given the depth of his influence.

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while, I felt a little better, but very little. 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 . . . 

And this one. It’s so good.

The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax.

I probably could have tabbed every other page with sentences that are that evocative.