Farewell, My Lovely

Chandler, Raymond. Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Little, Brown. 2013. Print

First Sentences:

It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all negro.

I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home.

Description:

I'm probably the only person interested in reading good books who had not read Raymond Chandler and his crusty private eye Philip Marlowe doggedly pursuing bad guys and luscious gals in the dark streets of Los Angeles in the 1930s. 

Well, no more am I on the outside looking in, having just finished Farewell, My Lovely. This is his second novel involving the detective Marlowe (after The Big Sleep) published in 1939, and definitely a great read.

Marlowe is a hard-bitten, street-wise private detective, innocently working on a small case when he is literally dragged into a music hall by a giant of a man looking for an old flame after his release from prison. Unfortunately, when people do not answer this giant's questions in a friendly enough manner, they end up dead.

Marlowe finds the local police to be lazy, corrupt, and completely uninterested in the crime, but before he can sniff around on his own, he is hired by a wealthy man who seeks a protective guard on an exchange a ransom for a rare jade necklace at an isolated drop point.

Still with me? Don't worry if this sounds confusing. Everything about this book is shady, like looking at a circus on a dark foggy night. The plot is compelling, twisty, and disjointed involving a long list of police, criminal, wealthy, and beautiful characters who hire, fire, fight with, threaten, love, lie to, and kidnap Marlowe at various times.

But the beauty of Farewell, My Lovely is always the language: tough, slangy, witty, acid-tongued, and altogether delightful. Many have tried to emulate this style, including Garrison Keillor in his Guy Noir: Private Eye bit on his radio show, Prairie Home Companion. But the language of Raymond Chandler is inimitable.

Need some examples? Try these:

• I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber's handkerchief.

• The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather grey for California, and probably had fewer windows that the Chrysler Building.

• On the glossy but not slippery floor, lay a rug as thin as silk and as old as Aesop's aunt.

• I felt as cold as Finnegan's feet, the day they buried him. 

• On the other side of the road was a raw clay bank at the edge of which a few indomitable wild flowers hung on like naughty children that won't go to bed.

• The wet air was a cold as the ashes of love.

• The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mailbag 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 total of a dollar and a half plus sales tax.

There are several disturbing racial descriptions of African-Americans, Italians, Indians, and a few others, but Farewell, My Lovely was written in the non-politically correct voice common in the 1930s among the police and people of the street. So I gulped and kept reading.

It is a page-turner, with a language, plot, characters, and narrator that completely absorb any reader from the opening page. Characters appear, disappear, lie, plead, and try to gain an edge in a staggering variety of ways, but it is all part of the atmosphere and admittedly complex plot.

In short, it was a fantastic read. A transporting tale that recreates a gritty Southern California and the underworld of crime figures and seedy goings-on that need looking into by the ever-weary, slick-talking, street-smart, cynical Philip Marlowe.

And more good news: Chandler wrote many more Marlowe books, so you have many nights ahead of you to get caught up on them all, like I plan to do.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye  

Marlowe works for a war veteran on the run after his ex-wife is murdered, but soon finds himself being pursued by gangsters.