Apart from this sentimental love-and-hate story,I’m ALWAYS impressed by the characters speaking like they carry a book of wit and humor,to the point that I’ll start picking up sharp-edged setences from here and add them to my daily conversation. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The writing is sharp and extravagant, utterly distinctive, and the observations on LA create an atmosphere that permeates the text.

Steve: Ha, I think I was getting some kind of award and spouting complete nonsense, like in one of my Goodreads reviews where I have nothing to say but say it anyway. In one paragraph, Raymond Chandler's genre-defining noir detective Philip Marlowe perfectly describes this bouncer and what he looks like. The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax. The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mailbag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax. If you like to take an enlightened look back at the fragility of fame, in the early days of Hollywood, at the procession line of starlets chewed up and spat out, the casting couches and the extremely questionable tactics of producers and directors, in the jaded lights of 1930s LA, then you can do no ill by reading this.But in this novel, I noticed that Marlowe tunes in to things that a typical hard head wouldn’t: he muses on how a building’s lobby is decorated, and he assesses the foliage growing out front. Mrs Grayle convinced Marriott to set up Marlowe to be killed in the canyon, but actually did so to kill Marriott because she viewed him as a 'weak link' who would reveal her secret past. When his employer is tucked in for the big sleep, Marlowe tries to piece the crime together, taking a few lumps in the process.

I suppose Lizard (that is, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) were the first of the on-again, off-again power couples. The casual racism is jarring to modern ears with use of the N word alongside descriptions of an 'Indian' (Native American) who is 'greasy' and 'smelly' and racially-inflected slang for passing Japanese and Italian characters. Definitely my favorite Chandler, beating out The Big Sleep by a star and more than a dozen memorable lines. Farewell, My Lovely, a Haycraft-Queen cornerstone, was adapted for screen on three occasions, and was the first Philip Marlowe novel to be filmed.

Farewell, My Lovely is an admirable followup, but it would be tough to meet or top one of the best detective novels of all time.

It's just the way he is, in a place where money and fame, at all costs, are the only gods, and glamour and intrigue prevail. Best of all though, the man is incapable of cutting slack or giving inches and is saltier than the Pacific Ocean. That a man occasionally smoked a stick of tea, a man who looked as if any touch of the exotic would appeal to him. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is one hell of an interesting character leaving me sad to know there are only six books in the series. Later that evening, in a deserted canyon, Marlowe waits in the dark and is hit on the head from behind.He gets quite knocked about in this story, which was good enough for me not to guess what was going on until I was told. He’s also a racist alcoholic, and after all the blows to the head he routinely takes, he’s almost certainly suffering from post-concussion syndrome so you gotta question his judgment.

Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe's sophmore adventure, is one of the better noir tales I've ever read. This book is timeless and one of the greats with the voice and turn-of-phrase that many have tried to duplicate and have failed.Philip Marlowe is looking for a woman's missing husband when he encounters Moose Malloy, a brute fresh out of prison, looking for his lost love Velma.