robk 's review for:

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
5.0
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:

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.