Few genres are as evocatively articulated in a single prose passage as is detective-noir in the novel Farewell, My Lovely. Those few short paragraphs would prove yet more memorable when transported to film.
It happens all at once after some sudden if typical violence. Our protagonist, private eye Philip Marlowe, is getting the business from two heavies he thinks are cops, only they aren’t very law-abiding. After roughing him up and warning him away from a crook, they kick him out of their car in the middle of a deserted road.
Scene over? Not quite. All at once, everything goes sideways:
The man in the back seat made a sudden flashing movement that I sensed rather than saw. A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night.
I dived into it. It had no bottom.
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| The iconic falling sequence, recreated in Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk. In the film, dream images are connected to plot points. In the novel, it is more random and haphazard, like everything else. Image from https://bookerhorror.com/murder-my-sweet-1944-dir-edward-dmytryk/ |
And so begins a fever dream that, in its classic 1944 adaptation Murder, My Sweet, lays out some film-noir principles with fuzzy focus effects and hallucinatory, disconnected faces. In the book, the effect is less pronounced but just as abrupt, a blend of reality and fantasy expressed in a truncated way that lets you the reader know there is no bottom to be found, just a lot of falling.
As a mood piece, Farewell, My Lovely develops a unique tone of bitter ennui, establishes in Marlowe a main character whose first-person narration offers jaded witticisms with just a hint of humanity, and weaves a tale of crime and betrayal which proves anything but straightforward long before the fever dream comes on.
As a story, however, Farewell, My Lovely is a wreck. It is constructed haphazardly by an author who seems openly bored with what appears in hindsight to be a strictly cliché-driven storyline, even if those clichés are sometimes disguised by difficulty making out what actually goes on.
Right from the start, the reader is plunged into a wild tale built more around spectacle than reality. Strolling along a street in Los Angeles, Marlowe spies a giant of a man barging into a private club. For some reason, this man pulls Marlowe inside with him. Since the club is restricted to black clientele, and this galoot, one Moose Malloy, is as white as Marlowe, a problem with management ensues, resolved when Moose breaks the club owner’s neck.
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| Downtown Los Angeles, circa 1940. Farewell, My Lovely opens with Philip Marlowe on a sidewalk like this, pondering lost business and unaware his next case is about to begin. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/570901690244932536/ |
Moose, it turns out, is just out of prison and looking for a former sweetheart named Velma. People who try to tell him Velma is dead risk Moose putting them in the same condition. Moose is a lot of trouble, and trouble, with or without Moose, has many ways of finding Marlowe.
Sometimes, though, Marlowe can handle it:
I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee. He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face. While he was still groaning I knocked him cold with the sap.
Violent moments like that helped author Raymond Chandler make a name for himself as a premier purveyor of hard-boiled detective fiction. His unique style has some quiet lyricism going for it, too:
Past all this and down a wide smooth curve to the bridle path of Beverly Hills and lights to the south, all colors of the spectrum and crystal clear in an evening without fog, past the shadowed mansions up on the hills to the north, past Beverly Hills altogether and up into the twisting foothill boulevard and the sudden cool dusk and the drift of wind from the sea.
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| A former oil executive, Raymond Chandler turned to crime fiction to make a living during the Great Depression. His stories often focus on the dark side of the American dream. Image from https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/raymond-chandler-crime-writer-s-family-left-waterford-but-the-city-never-left-him-1.4082933 |
No appreciation of Chandler’s talent is complete without mentioning his one-liners: “…he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food…” “…It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out…” “…A male cutie with henna’d hair drooped at a bungalow grand piano and tickled the key lasciviously and sang Stairway to the Stars in a voice with half the steps missing…” Best of all: “She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”
All this might mean something if in service of a decent crime story. Alas, you can’t have everything in this world. Farewell, My Lovely moves like a snail in a number of different directions, never quite explaining why or finding its flow, until I got to the part where Marlowe takes that psychedelic trip and realized disorientation had been Chandler’s mission all along.
The head trip itself happens and is resolved in a single chapter, in which Marlowe finds himself a prisoner in a private home that doubles as unofficial asylum. Basically, he is doped up and, after coming to in solitary confinement, struggles to shake off the webs and smoke he imagines himself surrounded by before beating up a guard, confronting a sketchy doctor, and eventually escaping without a fight.
Why is Marlowe taken into confinement? Why do they let him go? When adapted for the movies (three of them, in fact), loose ends like this get tied up. In Chandler’s novel, they are left fluttering. He seems to want this effect:
“It’s not that kind of story,” I said. “It’s not lithe and clever. It’s just dark and full of blood.”
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| A 1976 Vintage paperback edition, the cover depicting Marlowe's first meeting with good-girl Anne Riordan over the body of Marlowe's former employer. I don't know how to explain this in context; neither did Chandler as the episode makes no sense. Image from https://www.dpspbs.com/pages/books/3675/raymond-chandler/farewell-my-lovely |
The gore quotient is high for its time. When people get their brains beaten out, that’s literally what happens, with gray matter splattered all over their death-frozen faces.
The first killing is notable for the suddenness of it, happening two pages into the novel with no forewarning (we don’t hear the victim so much as say a word), and also for the way it is brushed off by everyone. Some of this is explained as being due to the victim’s race. “Well, all he did was kill a negro,” Marlowe says. “I guess that’s only a misdemeanor.”
I never like calling older books out for a lack of a modern consciousness; judge-not-lest-ye-be-judged and all that. One can argue the open racism in Farewell, My Lovely is intended as social commentary. Still, Marlowe’s own narration includes no less than three N-bombs, and his attitude toward that poor club owner’s demise is strikingly casual.
At one point in the middle of the narrative, Marlowe tells a police detective that “Malloy does not appear to me to be a killer type,” which is rich given what we see him do to the club owner, who only tried to defend himself when attacked. Moose goes on to kill a second person, a woman this time, and again Marlowe assures us he’s not a bad guy – apparently believing that enough to invite Moose into his house.
A lack of seriousness in Marlowe’s manner pocks his actions throughout this novel. Chandler establishes what was already a trope and would be even more so thanks to him with his protagonist’s blunt wisecrackery and refusal to kowtow to authority, but the way Marlowe goes about it seems counterproductive to his business, and hard to justify realistically.
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| Robert Mitchum as Marlowe plies information from Sylvia Miles in a 1975 movie adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely. Miles garnered an Oscar nomination as Jessie Florian, boozy keeper of secrets. "Man, this stuff dies painless with me," she says of the gin he brings her. Image from https://theroberttaylorodyssey.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/farewell-my-lovely/ |
I recently came across some negative comment about Chandler from another recognized master of crime fiction, James Ellroy. In a May 2019 interview with the London Guardian, Ellroy affirmed a longstanding dislike for Chandler, saying he found the plots “slapdash.” “I don’t like the books and I don’t think he knew people well,” Ellroy says.
In Farewell, characters don’t interact; they exchange canned banter:
“You sit there and tell me that after the man had you beaten up by a couple of crooked policemen and thrown in a two-day liquor cure to teach you to mind your own business? While the thing stands out so far you could break off a yard of it and still have enough left for a baseball bat.”
“I ought to have used that one,” I said. “Just my style. Crude. What sticks out?”
Anne Riordan never quite explains what “sticks out;” it’s just one of many notions floated and left unresolved. Anne is one of two love interests Marlowe has in the novel, the other being rich and married Mrs. Grayle, who has the inside lane for Marlowe’s affections: “I like smooth, shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin,” he explains.
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| While it cuts some corners, Murder, My Sweet is not only a terrific film in its own right but a better use of plot and characters than the novel it adapts. It also marked the successful reinvention of former musical actor Dick Powell as tough-guy hero. Image from https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/image-editorial/farewell-my-lovely-1944-5882325f |
There are some bracing moments of grittiness in the book, not always realistic or germane to what passes for its plot but certainly adult in their sensibilities. Marlowe plies one old boozehound for information and reflects on his culpability after:
A lovely old woman. I liked being with her. I liked getting her drunk for my own sordid purposes. I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me. You find almost anything under your hand in my business, but I was beginning to be a little sick at my stomach.
Chandler also takes a left-field shot at Ernest Hemingway, having Marlowe call him “a guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.” That amused me but also reinforced that sinking feeling this novel really had no bottom, no foundation, just a lot of scattered ideas and setpieces strung together.
Farewell,
My Lovely
was repurposed from three published short stories featuring Marlowe, and the
patches from the recycling job show. You can see when Chandler drops one
storyline and picks up another. Even when he does tie them together at the end,
the denouement has a canned, stale feeling about it, characters behaving as
characters, not people. I didn’t care who lived or died at the end; I was just
ready to move on.
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