Farewell, My Lovely

“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.” The first line of one of the great Phillip Marlowe books that I fell in love with. 

As a young man, I often went to work with a Raymond Chandler paperback in my pocket. I couldn't put him down. I wanted to be Marlowe and talk like him. Chandler created a hero who taught me American slang language and how to talk the talk. The book follows… show more.

Of course, for many people, the Name Phillip Marlowe conjures up images of Humphrey Bogart from the film versions. However, to read Raymond Chandler’s words is a treat. The story starts out with a murder, and Marlowe follows the clues to uncover an even larger mystery. It’s great to read the original version and hear Chandler’s own voice. No spoilers, But remember, the books are almost always better than the film. Great read!

It’s probably Raymond Chandler’s best novel. The story has all the elements Chandler is best known for biting humor, colorful characters that include gangsters and lawmen with violent streaks and hair-trigger temperaments, a keen insight into the sordid lives of society’s rich and powerful, and a private detective with a taste for alcohol and the soul of an avenging angel.

Phillip Marlowe is one of literature’s most famous private detectives, and probably cinema’s best portrayal of a jaded P.I. working the beat in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. Chandler’s creation portrays a flawed and borderline alcoholic who handles cases with the insight… show more.

Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is so well known that most people already have a sense that he’s a tough guy whose emotional qualms are readily subdued by booze. But in this novel, I noticed that Marlowe tunes in to things that a typical hard head wouldn’t: he muses on how a building’s lobby is decorated, and he assesses the foliage growing out front. The brutal racism of the era permeates the story, and for me that aspect makes it the opposite of escapist reading—it’s a tangential history lesson about the culture of LA, and it makes me grateful that things are… show more.

Of the two, “fathers of noir”, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Chandler who I first read, and got a taste, perhaps an addiction, for noir. I cannot remember what led me there, but I do remember at age fourteen I checked out Farewell, My Lovely from the public library.

I swiftly followed with all his remaining novels; Chandler died in 1959 four years before my birth. The characters, the settings, and the turn of phrase still work today—the similes especially, Marlowe’s cynical observations often bring a wry smile or an outright chuckle.

I still read Chandler, I’ve read… show more.