Farewell, My Lovely

Rating:
Summary: Chandler's best
Review: This is my favorite Raymond Chandler book and that's saying quite a lot. It has a sense of mystery to it that transcends the mystery genre.

Rating:
Summary: disappointing audio production
Review: This review is for the CD version of Eliot Gould's reading.

I love Chandler's writing and have read "Farewell" at least four times. Gould does a good job of reading it, too.

What's frustrating about the CD version is that the disks are not indexed. There was no effort to make a disk begin at the beginning of a chapter, for instance. Also, each disk holds one track only. That means if you want to pause for the night at the end of chapter 5, good luck finding your place when you return to listening in a few days.

Breaking the audio into tracks is a very easy thing to do, so primitive a technology that it makes it seem that this CD box set was mastered in the 1980s.

There is no competing product as of June 2003, however. Devotees may want to make their own MP3 files and then donate the CDs to a library.