Tonamel on 1/9/2006 at 19:40

---

I don't think it helped that I knew before reading that Marlowe was in a large number of Chandler's other stories. So even when he's beaten up and getting shot at, my reaction didn't go much farther than "Eh, he'll be fine."

That said, I still enjoyed it for the clever writing. Real Noir Metaphors like "Her ankles had enough melodic lines to construct a tone poem," make it pretty understandable why everybody thinks of noir like (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=104499) this.

I liked the fact that Marlowe didn't carry a gun. Not what you'd expect from a Hard Boiled Detective.

And I guess I'm just not as verbose as you guys, because that's all I can think to say.

Stitch on 1/9/2006 at 20:08

---

Nonsense, you've made some excellent observations.

Yeah, my comments on it being dated had a lot more to do with social issues, as the dame slapping and fag baiting wouldn't play quite as well in modern times. But the book wasn't remotely dated in tone, if that makes sense. I was a bit surprised at how well the prose has aged.

Also, agreed on the weirdness of the almost-romance with Mars' wife. It seemd very uncharacteristic for Marlowe, at least the Marlowe we've seen up to that point.

But wouldn't that be your reaction to any book written in the past tense from the first person?

Malygris on 2/9/2006 at 02:48

---

Thin but fun pretty well sums it up. Personally, I loved it; it was the typewritten equivalent of a good old rollicking adventure movie, and I had a blast. Certainly there was never any sense of urgency or danger in the situations Marlowe found himself in; it was made very clear that he operated at least two full layers higher than anyone else around him, and along with his nearly-supernatural intuition and leaps in logic, he also apparently has a particular sort of iron-clad smooth cool that's twice as effective as the rod he never packs.

I also thought it was pretty cool that he almost never carried a gun, and that the story was free of the free-wheeling shootouts we might have expected in a book like this. (That may just be my own presumptions speaking, however.) Plenty of booze, broads and cigarettes, but no guns: I like to imagine that it really was a better time.

Now, I don't know if this is allowed but I'm going to do it anyway: after the clusterfuck involved in scoring Life of Pi (coming soon to an Ignatz near you), I was very fortunate to find the Raymond Chandler Compendium at ye olde used book store, and after reading The Big Sleep, I moved on and ran through Farewell, My Lovely as well. I actually enjoyed it more; I got the feeling Chandler had really learned some lessons from The Big Sleep, and had tightened his craft considerably as a result. Descriptive passages in particular felt less wooden, as though he was writing with considerably more ease and confidence, and the characters (aside from Marlowe, who was basically the same unflappable tough guy) felt much more "alive," far more fleshed out and human. I started to lose the plot near the end - the last few pages had just a wee bit of a "pulled out of ass" feel to them - and the final resolution was very much both coincidental and convenient, but I suppose that's something you live with when you're reading 60-year-old noir. I was also bothered somewhat by the motivations of the characters, in particular the bad guy (NO SPOILERS DAMMIT) because it hardly seemed worth murder, but in retrospect I began to accept it a bit more. Much like the underground pornography in The Big Sleep, what's no big deal now may have been some serious shit back then - perhaps even enough to kill for.

But what really put me on my ass, and yes, this is the point you might have been wondering if I would be getting to, is how absolutely dated the book is in one particular way: racially. I had a hell of a time with the opening of the story, in which some big goon throws a shine out of a bar because he doesn't know it's a dinge joint, and I'm thinking, what the FUCK speak english man, but eventually I manage to figure out that shine, smoke, dinge and possibly others are all 30s-era synonyms for nigger - a fact which made itself clear when Moose Malloy said, "Rise up, nigger."

I was honestly shocked when two and two came together, even given the age of the story. I knew enough about the era to know it wasn't the best time to be a person of colour, but it never occurred to me that slurs of that depth would be such a casual part of the literary lexicon. I thought at first that perhaps it was a method used by Chandler to separate the bad guys from the not-so-bad, who would use the gentler term Negro, but eventually in the story even Marlowe himself would refer to "the nigger murder."

(An interesting aside to this is the fact that as the story progresses, Marlowe interacts with a black hotel keeper, treats him with courtesy and respect, and is responded to in kind; the hotelier is presented as a reasonably intelligent and well-spoken individual, if somewhat boozy, coming across as one of the more respectable individuals in Chandler's seedy underworld. A bit like Harry Jones, maybe, minus the unpleasant end.)

So it's not The Big Sleep, but the only real angle we have to work with here is the historical one (otherwise, it's just a fun, adventurous story about the world's most kick-ass-cool private dick) and Farewell, My Lovely is so much more powerful from this particular perspective. These are great stories about great times, packed with bullets and broads and booze, where men can say things like, "She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a business men's lunch," and expect to be taken seriously; and also a time when people would talk about "shine murders" with the same depth of concern as they'd have for a dog run over in the street. For me, it was absolutely fascinating to see the "real thing," pervasive racism, cast in a non-judgemental light, by someone who was there and knew it as nothing more than a simple fact of life.

Gingerbread Man on 2/9/2006 at 04:14

---

The chauffer's death is never explained or expanded upon. Whether Brody killed him (accidentally or on purpose) and then chucked him and the car into the water, or Taylor committed suicide / was dizzy from getting whalloped by Brody and careened off the pier is unknown. I've always wondered if Chandler intended that to be a tantalising omission, got drunk and forgot to write anything more about it, or simply felt that the character was unimportant and didn't warrant having his fate explained.

I lean more heavily toward the second explanation most of the time.

Tonamel on 2/9/2006 at 06:31

---

Same here. I think Mr "Go ---- yourself." may have been my favorite character, though, just for some of the comedy that went with him.

"Has he done anything?"
"He gave me a suggestion, but I decided to let it ride."