Sarcastic and cynical – a classic Private Investigator

Farewell my Lovely by Raymond Chandler is the second of his crime series featuring Private Investigator Phillip Marlowe (the first is The Big Sleep which is one of the best crime novels ever written despite a famously tortuous plot). I listened to this book on audio where it was read by Scott Brick who I thought made an excellent job of conveying the world weariness of Marlowe and the seediness of the rest of the characters. The book was first published in 1940 so it was written about America in the 1930s. There are a couple of instances where the author uses words which we would now think are inappropriate about Black people but this doesn’t happen too often and it is, of course, appropriate to the time in which it was written.

Marlowe finds himself standing in the street faced by a huge man, dressed smartly but in an unorthodox manner. Moose Malloy has just been released from prison having been convicted of an armed robbery he says that he didn’t commit. At the point of his arrest he had been intending to marry a club singer called Velma and now he has returned to the club to find out what has happened to his lost love. As the club has changed hands and is now a club restricted to a Black clientele Marlowe accompanies his new friend to try and prevent any bloodshed – he fails. This one kind act of Marlowe’s, possibly prompted by curiosity, leads him to his own search for Velma and immerses him in death, corruption and seediness.

Marlowe has no illusions left and it soon becomes obvious that he is right about California and the time in which he lives. His quest for Velma means that several people end up dead and he gets threatened with great regularity by the police, gangsters and other parties. He gets knocked out more than once, arrested and imprisoned in a secure hospital. No one is who they first seem and they are all guilty of something. By the end of the book you realise that the rich and successful people are as corrupt and nasty as the hoodlums on the streets.

The plotting is intricate and I might have lost track of what exactly was happening once or twice but it didn’t matter because it is the narrative voice of Marlowe, and his wisecracks and cynical view of the world that make the story so riveting. This is a style that is often imitated but, in my view, rarely bettered. Marlowe’s descriptions of people and his commentary on events are amusing and inventive and I was gripped all the way through this story.