 "It's not that kind of story, it's not lithe and clever. It's just dark and full of blood." So says Philip Marlowe, the washed-up granddad of hardboiled detectives when he recounts his tale. Except it is lithe, and it is very clever and it's also the ultimate archetypal ancestor of the classic detective murder mystery. Book Two. The Big Sleep was Chandler's first novel and it feels it. It was cobbled together from a pair of short stories and reworked to make any sense but it still didn't completely. I loved The Big Sleep for all it's erratic structure and loose ends, but Farewell, My Lovely is a textbook on detective fiction. It's clean, logical and precise. If The Big Sleep breaks the detective mold, Farewell makes it. “It was a nice walk if you liked grunting.”  Detective Philip Marlowe works in LA during the 30's when he stumbles onto a murder that sucks him into a mystery. He's minding his own business on a dead-end case, and broke, when an ex-convict named Moose Malloy drags him (literally off the street) into a search for his missing ex-girlfriend, Velma, before killing a nightclub owner at the place she used to sing. The cops don't bother because the owner was black and it's a black club now, but it didn't used to be. Marlowe decides to get nosy. He tracks down the wife of the former owner and bribes her with bourbon to tell him this Velma is dead. No problem. Case closed. “I didn’t say anything. I lit my pipe again. It makes you look thoughtful when you’re not thinking.” Marlowe gets a call. Another case. A rich young dandy, maybe a gigolo, named Marriott wants to hire him to tag along for a ransom exchange regarding a stolen jade necklace. The exchange goes sour. When Marlowe wakes up, Marriott is dead. The cops don't like the story, but Marlowe meets the girl, a rich blonde named Mrs. Grayle and gets her to hire him to find the necklace, so he can keep being nosy. "Play the hunch. Play the hunch and get stung. In a little while you wake up with your mouth full of hunches. You can't order a cup of coffee without shutting your eyes and stabbing the menu. Play the hunch." Being nosy don't go so well. Marlowe's investigation leads him to a psychic conman, corrupt cops in Bay City, and a dope hospital where they lock him up and keep him sedated. He gets beat up and knocked out at every turn until being sapped on the back of the head becomes kind of his signature move, and he finally starts to piece it together. The gigolo owns the old lady's house. The rich girl visited the psychic. The missing Moose Malloy was hiding out at the dope hospital. The cops in Bay City aren't all corrupt, they're just stuck in the middle. And Velma... Whatever happened to Velma? Because you can bet she ain't dead. The old lady who said so, though, now she's the one who's dead, killed by accident by Moose Malloy, still on the loose. Still looking for her. “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.” It's always the girl. Velma was a redhead, but Mrs. Grayle is a blonde bombshell, married to money much older than her and not afraid to use it. “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.” She gets around with the likes of Marriott (before he was murdered) and she wouldn't mind landing more than a kiss on Marlowe, either, but the husband don't mind. He's in love. So was Marriott before his murder. So was Malloy, for "Velma" back when she was just a club singer. “Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.” Chandler sets up the perfect classic confrontation, with Malloy hidden in a closet while Marlowe gets the truth out of Mrs. Grayle. She is "Velma" and she's the one who put Malloy in prison in the first place. She's the one who killed Marriott because he knew everything. There was never a jade necklace. "All she did was take her hand out of her bag, with a gun in it. All she did was point it at me and smile. All I did was nothing." The plot is the kind of predictable mystery you can only put together after the fact. I only called the twist the page before the reveal (I'm a real swell guy). Mostly it's just too random and messy to make any sense of and Marlowe doesn't barely make any better headway either, until suddenly he does. It's fun to figure at, but not as fun to read. Chandler is a machine gun of witty one liners and bratty barbs. No two characters get along for a single conversation. Everyone exchanges insults, whether pals or enemies. That's why the only way to review it is to pepper it with quotes, and there's plenty where those came from. Even more than The Big Sleep. Chandler can't resist going even a paragraph without his terse and pulpy prose, and it's as intoxicating as a stiff drink. “You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.” Conclusion: 5 out of 5 stars. Not as innovative as The Big Sleep, but technically superior by every measurable metric, Farewell sets a high water mark for the entire detective fiction genre and lays the foundation for the next 60+ years of novels, TV and movies we've come to enjoy. Every page drips with delicious and salty wisecracks, every chapter dolls out clues and twists, and every character creams with charisma. Chandler paints a gritty, weary picture of a seedy time in a seedy city full of regular folk. Marlowe doesn't have a backstory, a love interest, family drama or fatal flaws. There isn't any moral to the story or lesson or much of a theme. It all exists as a pastiche of itself, pure pulp fiction for no higher purpose than entertainment. And that's what makes it fun. One more for the road: "Who is this Hemingway person?" "A gag," I said. "A guy who keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good."  One of three film adaptations. Don't Forget to Like and Retweet!
More Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep Ian Fleming's Bond Series Casino Royale To Live and Let Die Moonraker Diamonds Are Forever Hemingway's To Have and Have Not Steinbeck's East of Eden
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