Farewell, My Lovely (Phillip Marlowe)

Product Information

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. Farewell My Lovely is perhaps my favourite of all Raymond Chandler's books, although he was not a prolific author and there aren't too many to choose from. The novel is very well written and has an old-fashioned touch (busty blondes, crooked police officers, Italian mobsters), giving it a natural charm.

Marlowe meets Malloy one hot day in Hollywood and, out of the generosity of his jaded heart, agrees to help. Velma flees, but when she is eventually tracked down in Baltimore, she kills the detective who recognizes her, and commits suicide when cornered. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. Mandarin's Jade" was the basis for the middle sections about a jewel theft which may or may not have actually happened, the murder of a blackmailer, and a corrupt psychic who works with a crime ring.His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with "private detective," both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. You could have the most exciting plot imaginable but if the writing isn't up to snuff, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, but sometimes an author can be so good that the plot is almost secondary. It is the pinnacle of great crime fiction mainly because the way the author describes each scene in the book in great detail and all the wise cracks between the characters makes for a quick flowing read. Lewin ( Helen) Grayle but money doesn't smell, ( not always) things go dark and when Philip awakes at night in the lonely canyon, his client is no more. And when the huge convict, one Moose Malloy picks him and tosses him aside, easy as a lion swats aside a ball of yarn, well.

Finally, there are the passages that aren’t just clever quips or snappy dialogue, but that convey a real sense of emotion.

There's also a lot of beautiful landscape prose which can get missed and his attention to detail (or maybe Marlowe's) is impressive. The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as "arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery". The writing is sharp and extravagant, utterly distinctive, and the observations on LA create an atmosphere that permeates the text. It was during the Depression era that he seriously turned his hand to writing, and his first published story appeared in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1933, followed six years later, when he was fifty, by his first novel, The Big Sleep . Audience Question: You’re known for your essay on the Kantian aesthetic of disinterested judgment as seen in the works of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Dan Brown.