Farewell, My Lovely

Rating:
Summary: Riveting!
Review: From the first paragraph to the last, I was held hostage by Chandler's writing. The action comes at you faster than a bouncer's fist and is just as relentless. This was the first Chandler book I'd read and though I'd heard a lot about his stature as a noir writer, I have to say he did not disappoint in the least. Marlowe is a man's man. He doesn't back down from a challenge, he enjoys the women he likes, dismisses those he dislikes, fights the good fight, and he always tells it like it is!

I worked my way through Hammett, Thompson, Mosley, and others, and now it looks like I'm going to work my way through Chandler.

Rating:
Summary: Another great Marlowe book...
Review: I finished THE BIG SLEEP in a few days and was so impressed by the book, I immediately bought FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. Another great novel by Chandler.

The book begins with Marlowe being pulled into a barroom mishap when an ex-con is looking for his girl. Once Marlowe finishes with the police reports, he thinks his day is over. At the office he receives a phone call from a man who needs his help. The man asks Marlowe to accompany him to a 'business' meeting. This is only the beginning of a twisted mystery which Marlowe is faced with solving.

Once again Chandler does a great job of weaving various stories and characters in an effortless manner which takes the reader easily through the mystery. I look forward to reading another Marlowe mystery...they are pure joy!

Rating:
Summary: Good, but I like Hammett better
Review: I recently listened to the unabridged version of this book narrated by Elliott Gould, and while Chandler's glimpse of 1940's era Los Angeles was surely entertaining, I still like Dashiell Hammett's "Continental Op" novels better. In Farewell, My Lovely, private dick Philip Marlowe starts out working for a barber on a minor job and unrealistically stumbles onto a murder by a hulk of an ex-con, looking for his old girl Velma in a club where she used to work. Marlowe then is mysteriously contacted out of the blue to provide security for a shady jewel transaction, in which a rich dandy is to attempt to buy back some precious jade from the thieves who stole it.

The novel moves at a brisk pace, and while some of the plot twists seem a little forced, they are entertaining nonetheless. One of my main problems with the story is that Marlowe seems to spend most of the novel putting his life in danger, getting knocked out, shot at or drugged, without much of an incentive to get involved. He often seems to be acting on his own, without a paying client, despite warnings from the police to stay away coupled with the obvious dangers. Hammett's continental op, in novels like The Dain Curse, at least had a paying client ordering him to snoop into the multi-layered mysteries, with significant insurance money at stake.

Ultimately, without giving away too much of the story, Chandler does a pretty good job of throwing a lot of balls in the air and wrapping up most of the loose ends by story's end. Some threads are left unresolved, like the whereabouts and motives of the mysterious doctor and psychic in Bay City, but most of the rest of the plot makes sense. LIke another reviewer said, at the end of the novel, while you may have enjoyed the ride, you are left with somewhat of an empty feeling.

As for the narration, I expected a little more from Mr. Gould, an accomplished stage and screen actor who seems to sleepwalk his way through the beginning of the book as if he was handed a copy of the novel, a microphone, and told to read. He later changes pace a little, adopting different voices for different characters, but I found the voices ill-suited to the characters and sometimes caricatures of policemen or gangsters, as if the novel was a scene from a "Bowery Boys" episode.

Rating:
Summary: Noir perfection
Review: I started reading Raymond Chandler after the author of one of my favorite new authors of last year, Richard K. Morgan, was compared left and right to him. The comparison was apt, and Morgan should be flattered, because Chandler is a genius.

Farewell, My Lovely is Chandler's second book, and features his hero, Philip Marlowe, a smart-mouthed, hard-boiled private dick who is straight as an arrow. I had read that The Big Sleep, Chandler's first book, was his best, and that they descended in quality chronologically. But after reading this book, I know that is wrong. This is one of the best stories I've read in a long time. not only is the wonderful noir narrative there, but the mystery is first-rate.

Rating:
Summary: Hardboiled Gold
Review: I'm not much of a fiction reader, but I have just about everything Chandler ever wrote, including a copy of his screenplay for "Double Indemnity." Every couple of years I go back and read everything all over again. How many mysteries can you do that with?

The thing is, of course, that you don't read Chandler for the mystery, which is just as well, because it's hard to figure out the story line in his books sometimes. You read, and re-read, Chandler because he created a whole universe in his novels - an image of a Los Angeles with a seedy underside, which suited perfectly the milieu that was associated with the town in the 1940's - the movie people and the parasites that lived off of them, the internal immigrants that flooded California from the Midwest during the Depression, the alienation under a bright sun. A lot of people got their image of California from Chandler.

You also read him for the irresistable charm of his protagonist, Marlowe, the shopworn Galahad with the relentlessly absorbing internal monologue that has been imitated by everybody from Jean Claude Belmondo to Garrison Keillor. For a while, Hollywood couldn't get enough of Marlowe, and well into the 70's movies were being made of his books - several of them have been made into movies twice, including this one. I sometimes think that the Marlowe character appeals very strongly to men, or at least a certain type of men, and that's why so many actors - Bogart, Robert Montgomery, Robert Mitchum, and especially Dick Powell - really wanted to play him on the screen.

The story starts out with Marlowe just walking down the street and not minding his own business, as usual, and ends up with multiple murders (some of them totally senseless), unspoken mistakes in judgement ( a favorite device of Chandler's) and a lot of unanswered questions. You always find yourself with a sense of brooding emptiness at the end of a Chandler book, a feeling that you've been through an incredible struggle to no purpose at all, and yet you're always glad you were along for the ride all the same.

This may very well be the best of the Marlowe novels; it's in my top two for technical perfection along with "The Big Sleep", although I have a personal emotional attachment to "The Long Goodbye." My advice: try them all.

Rating:
Summary: The magic of Marlowe
Review: In "Farewell, My Lovely," Raymond Chandler's second Philip Marlowe novel, Marlowe reluctantly agrees to help a careworn police detective search for a nightclub girl named Velma, a former girlfriend of an ogreish ex-convict named Moose Malloy who is wanted for murder. Marlowe's first lead is the nightclub owner's widow, whom he plies with liquor, only to find out that Velma's whereabouts are being kept a guarded secret. Then, in what initially seems like an unrelated subplot, Marlowe is hired by a man who wants "backup" while he delivers money to some jewel thieves. The man ends up murdered, and Marlowe meets a mysterious girl at the scene of the crime. To think there's no connection between this event and Velma's disappearance would be to underestimate Chandler's genius at plot construction.

Chandler cleverly plants false leads to twist the already unpredictable plot and subtle clues that make sense at the end. His colorful characters are masters of deceit; the reader imagines that these people must have great poker faces. They know a lot more than what they're telling Marlowe, and it's exciting to know that Marlowe will eventually be able to guess what they're leaving out. Like J.R.R. Tolkien's Gandalf, Marlowe is one of literature's greatest magicians; the fun of reading the book is waiting for him to pull the rabbit out of the hat at the end.

Rating:
Summary: The magic of Marlowe
Review: In "Farewell, My Lovely," Raymond Chandler's second Philip Marlowe novel, Marlowe reluctantly agrees to help a careworn police detective search for a nightclub girl named Velma, a former girlfriend of an ogreish ex-convict named Moose Malloy who is wanted for murder. Marlowe's first lead is the nightclub owner's widow, whom he plies with liquor, only to find out that Velma's whereabouts are being kept a guarded secret. Then, in what initially seems like an unrelated subplot, Marlowe is hired by a man who wants "backup" while he delivers money to some jewel thieves. The man ends up murdered, and Marlowe meets a mysterious girl at the scene of the crime. To think there's no connection between this event and Velma's disappearance would be to underestimate Chandler's genius at plot construction.

Chandler cleverly plants false leads to twist the already unpredictable plot and subtle clues that make sense at the end. His colorful characters are masters of deceit; the reader imagines that these people must have great poker faces. They know a lot more than what they're telling Marlowe, and it's exciting to know that Marlowe will eventually be able to guess what they're leaving out. Like J.R.R. Tolkien's Gandalf, Marlowe is one of literature's greatest magicians; the fun of reading the book is waiting for him to pull the rabbit out of the hat at the end.

Rating:
Summary: Another big steep for the noir literature
Review: In case you were wondering that Raymond Chandler's 'The Big Sleep' was a fluke, wonder no more, go and read his follow up "Farewell, My Lovely". It is hard to choose which one is the best, because they are both so good. In this new adventure of his best character Philip Marlowe there are many more adventures, thrills and mysteries than in the first novel.

In this second step of the noir literature, Chandler has built up and developed his style and characters, so he spends no time with that. The novel begins with plain action, and it takes only a few pages for the writer to set the main mystery of this narrative. Once it is done, he has all time in the world to make the weirdest people cross Marlow's path.

Like in the previous book, the prose is dry, there aren't many descriptions --only of some characters, but nothing that evocative-- and it is not a bad thing. by using such a device Chandler is able to write non-stop action making the main plot more and more intrincated, until its solution. A great book, highly recommended to readers who like mistery novels of high quality and beautiful prose.

Rating:
Summary: Another big steep for the noir literature
Review: In case you were wondering that Raymond Chandler's `The Big Sleep' was a fluke, wonder no more, go and read his follow up "Farewell, My Lovely". It is hard to choose which one is the best, because they are both so good. In this new adventure of his best character Philip Marlowe there are many more adventures, thrills and mysteries than in the first novel.

In this second step of the noir literature, Chandler has built up and developed his style and characters, so he spends no time with that. The novel begins with plain action, and it takes only a few pages for the writer to set the main mystery of this narrative. Once it is done, he has all time in the world to make the weirdest people cross Marlow's path.

Like in the previous book, the prose is dry, there aren't many descriptions --only of some characters, but nothing that evocative-- and it is not a bad thing. by using such a device Chandler is able to write non-stop action making the main plot more and more intrincated, until its solution. A great book, highly recommended to readers who like mistery novels of high quality and beautiful prose.

Rating:
Summary: What a chauvinist detective
Review: In Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, an everyday detective, Marlowe, gets wrapped up in a hermeneutic search that could eventually cost him his life. Everything he does affects what will be and, in turn, he winds up changing the course of his search as he becomes caught in its very tentacles. Leading from one murder and scandal to another, this mystery novel addresses corruption and deceit in all of its forms. While it is occasionally difficult to understand because of Chandler's creative habit of inventing new detection slang, it yet creates for an engaging read as it keeps readers in suspense and "in the dark" until the climax of the book, during which time everything is revealed. More than many other detection novels, this one follows a more Sherlock Holmesesque method of detection by revealing and explaining all in a very short, descriptive, "aha!" type of moment, which is exciting to the reader who has been trying to solve the mystery all along.

However, while the eventual mastermind turns out to be a cunning, selfish woman, the overall portrayal of women in this 1940's novel is daunting. Although often depicted as intelligent, they are also often depicted as needing and revering men. Furthermore, Marlowe's sarcastic confidence and desire to rescue women just gives an overall bad taste to the novel as he looks at women as burdens, sex objects, and inferior beings. In fact, he doesn't very highly esteem African Americans, either. In conclusion, while this book is an interesting read, it is too great a reminder of gender and racial inequalities to be enjoyable.