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3.91 AVERAGE
3.91 AVERAGE
Philip Marlowe is a Private Investigator, he has his own dark shadows, but he tries to do a good job. He is conscientious in his own way and has his own moral codes. He is grey enough to take kisses offered to him but stops things going too far (again, not exactly a likeable man but not a despicable one)
People are not held up to any high standards of morality, the cynicism of the author seems to bleed into the pages. (This is where the intro helped me make sense of why that might be so).
The second case that we meet Philip Marlowe in is when he is looking for a missing person. He finds himself in a mixed neighbourhood (which leads to a pretty good look at how things must have been for ‘coloured’ business owners at the time). While he wanders, he meets a BIG man. This man is looking for someone he knew from before he went to prison. He is also deaf to reason and ends up leaving a lot of chaos in his wake.
Marlowe is but a witness, although the events get him involved in a very convoluted plot. A lot of individual circumstances all tie back to the start point without being too convenient. There is also obviously a dangerous, beautiful woman involved (actually, two).
Fast drinking, driving and killing soon make its way into the tale and are strewn across the narrative. When the train of thought is described at the end, it is hard to disagree with the way things turned out. I had trouble getting into it when I first started it because of how the story was being presented. I almost gave up after a chapter or so, but slowly with time, I got the hang of the storytelling style and liked the end result!
I'm not normally a big detective novel fan, but you really can't go wrong with Chandler. Well written, fantastic characters and some truly great dialogue.
Enjoyable, but not as good as The Big Sleep. The main mystery of the story just doesn't hold your interest in the same way, and the plot just feels muddled and confusing rather than mysterious. Chandler writes like nobody else, though, which is always a joy.
It's good to read a book like this every now and then, like glancing at WWF for 10 minutes just to mix things up a bit.
The flatfoot detective, I love it.
The flatfoot detective, I love it.
Well-written with quite amusing characterizations. But this type of plot just isn't me. I was very excited at first, but lost interest after about 50 pages...
This was the most enjoyable book I have read in a long time. Seriously. Farewell, My Lovely had all the essential elements of a great noir/mystery, but it also had so much more. It had the convoluted but well-paced and digestible plot, the witty dialogue, and the cast of unforgettable characters, but it also had some literary spunk as well. Chandler's similes are not to be missed. They are delightful. In fact, his whole writing style is delightful. Stripped of all accouterment. No unnecessary verbosity. Pure goodness. Here's a few samples of what I mean:
Chandler also throws in some nice allusions to classic literature, subliminally aligning himself with great detective writers from history like Poe and Conan-Doyle, and mocking his literary contemporary, Ernest Hemingway.
I guess I will let Chandler's words do the talking and end this review right here. Let me just reiterate, this is a great book, well worth the time.
Sitting there alone I felt like a high-class corpse, laid out by an undertaker with a lot of good taste.
I looked at my watch once more. It was more than time for lunch. My stomach burned from the last drink. I wasn’t hungry. I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief. I nodded across the office at Mr. Rembrandt, then I reached for my hat and went out. I was halfway to the elevator before the thought hit me. It hit me without any reason or sense, like a dropped brick. I stopped and leaned against the marbled wall and pushed my hat around on my head and suddenly I laughed.
I stopped thinking. Lights moved behind my closed lids. I was lost in space. I was a gilt-edged sap come back from a vain adventure. I was a hundred dollar package of dynamite that went off with a noise like a pawnbroker looking at a dollar watch. I was a pink-headed bug crawling up the side of the City Hall.
I was asleep.
Chandler also throws in some nice allusions to classic literature, subliminally aligning himself with great detective writers from history like Poe and Conan-Doyle, and mocking his literary contemporary, Ernest Hemingway.
He pushed his empty cup at me and I refilled it. His eyes were going over my face line by line, corpuscle by corpuscle, like Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass or Thorndyke with his pocket lens.
He looked at the one with the mustache again. “This guy is very tough,” he told him. “He wants to shoot an Indian.”
“Listen, Hemingway, don’t repeat everything I say,” I said.
“I think the guy is nuts,” the big one said. “He just called me Hemingway. Do you think he is nuts?
...
“Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”
I guess I will let Chandler's words do the talking and end this review right here. Let me just reiterate, this is a great book, well worth the time.
I've been searching my whole life for a private detective whose ". . . method of approach is soothin' to a man's dignity" and I believe I may have found him. Although we aren't madly in love yet, our relationship is off to a pretty swell start. I had a hard time with finishing this book. There was too much going on & too many weird anachronisms - for example, you say, "You're a nice lad. Dartmouth or Dannemora?" and suddenly tough guys become your friends - what is that about? I took a break at page 236 and read a whole other book, so in coming back to this, I had forgotten important stuff like why Marlowe was going to meet Brunette. However, the end was tied up beautifully in a tidy package and really, the writing is exquisite, so I will be visiting my buddy Marlowe again & soon.
The story covered a lot of ground, spooling out from a quick beginning so smoothly I couldn't quite believe how far it had gone, like riding a high-speed elevator. The characters were complicated people—few of them black-and-white bad, and few black-and-white good—but they did enough bad things that I still feel unpleasant. Hemingwayish writing style, and humor like his, though more indulgent. "I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber's handkerchief." Good to get to know personally such a famous guy as Philip Marlowe, who is a twin kind of stubborn with Jimmy McNulty—who is himself, perhaps, christened after a (very unlike) detective herein named Nulty? Mostly I forgot all that and just enjoyed the ride. Characters so sharply sketched I could hang my hat on them, including the nicest man with violet eyes.
This is the second book starring hard-bitten private detective Phillip Marlowe. As with the first book, The Big Sleep, Marlowe's narrative is what makes this book worth reading. While the story is fine, with a decent mystery and fair pacing, it's Marlowe's slang-ridden, dryly humorous observations that keep me turning the pages.
This book is, as with the first, very reflective of the ingrained prejudices of its time, and the easily offended will probably not make it past the first page, where 'negro' appears three times, but I found the story to be all the more engaging because of its unvarnished view of its time - so much more interesting to read the books written then, where these words and concepts flow naturally because it was just the way it was, rather than books set during that time but written now, that frequently try too hard to belabor the point that there were prejudices. It was genuinely disturbing to see how no one really cared about the first murder in the story because the victim was 'only a negro,' and that the case was given to a man on the police force generally considered to not be important or skilled enough to deal with something 'more worthwhile.' In the end, when Marlowe mentions to the murderer that he may have been able to get away with killing 'just a shade,' he really won't be able to get out of also killing a white woman.
So yes, a fun story with a lot of twists and a fairly satisfying (if somewhat hurried) ending; Marlowe's voice is absolutely hilarious; and, to me, an absolutely fascinating look and reminder of how in the not-so-distant past, having separate 'joints' for blacks and whites was not only normal, but considered completely unlikely to ever change. 3.5/5, and I plan to continue reading more of Chandler's works.
After a little while, I felt a little better, but very little. 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.
This book is, as with the first, very reflective of the ingrained prejudices of its time, and the easily offended will probably not make it past the first page, where 'negro' appears three times, but I found the story to be all the more engaging because of its unvarnished view of its time - so much more interesting to read the books written then, where these words and concepts flow naturally because it was just the way it was, rather than books set during that time but written now, that frequently try too hard to belabor the point that there were prejudices. It was genuinely disturbing to see how no one really cared about the first murder in the story because the victim was 'only a negro,' and that the case was given to a man on the police force generally considered to not be important or skilled enough to deal with something 'more worthwhile.' In the end, when Marlowe mentions to the murderer that he may have been able to get away with killing 'just a shade,' he really won't be able to get out of also killing a white woman.
So yes, a fun story with a lot of twists and a fairly satisfying (if somewhat hurried) ending; Marlowe's voice is absolutely hilarious; and, to me, an absolutely fascinating look and reminder of how in the not-so-distant past, having separate 'joints' for blacks and whites was not only normal, but considered completely unlikely to ever change. 3.5/5, and I plan to continue reading more of Chandler's works.