Raymond Chandler - Farewell, My Lovely

 

 Rating: 5/5

Review:

Still brilliant

 

This must the fourth or fifth time I have read Farewell, My Lovely and it's still brilliant. It’s the second Marlowe book and opens with an unforgettable scene in which the huge Moose Malloy literally hauls the unwitting Marlowe into an old nightclub to look for Velma, the singer whom he loved there before doing eight years for an armed robbery. The plot becomes convoluted but is always comprehensible, and involves jewel thieves, blackmail and murder – and poor old Marlowe being knocked out and ill-treated more than once.

I have to say that right at the start, the racist attitudes and language of the USA in 1940 are obvious and very ugly. It can be hard to take (it was for me) but that is how it was then and it has to be faced.

Everything else about the book is brilliant. The prose, the characters and the plot are just as great as ever; Moose Malloy, Lieutenant Nulty, Anne Riordan, Mr Lindsey Marriott and others – even the man on the desk of a hotel, who makes a brief appearance – are are all unforgettable. And no one does similes better than Chandler, I think (with the possible exception of Wodehouse, of course). "I felt like an amputated leg", "a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window", “Mr Lindsey Marriott’s face looked as if he had swallowed a bee”, and so on. Genius. Added to this are occasional contemplative paragraphs, some humorous, some quite profound – like this, after Marlowe has been knocked unconscious:

“I had been out for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes sleep. Just a nice doze. In that time I had muffed a job and lost eight thousand dollars. Well, why not? In twenty minutes you can sink a battleship, down three or four planes, hold a double execution. You can die, get married, get fired and find a new job, have a tooth pulled, have your tonsils out. In twenty minutes you can even get up in the morning. You can get a glass of water at a night club—maybe.”

Chandler was in a class of his own in this genre. After eighty years it remains quite outstanding, I think – and I’m sure I’ll be reading it again at some point, just for the pleasure of it.