Raymond Chandler, Part 3: Farewell, My Lovely

Read the episode (Narration script)

Farewell, My Lovely begins on Central Avenue, in the part of Los Angeles where the city's Black neighborhoods were growing in the late 1930s. Philip Marlowe is there on a small job, looking for a missing barber. He is standing on the sidewalk when a man comes out of a bar backwards, thrown, and lands in the gutter. The man who threw him is Moose Malloy. In one of Chandler's best-known sentences, he is described as a big man, "but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck."

Moose is dressed in clothes loud enough to stop traffic, and he has just finished eight years in prison for a bank robbery. The bar used to be a white nightclub called Florian's, where his girlfriend, a singer named Velma, worked before he went inside. He has come back for her. The club has changed hands, nobody knows Velma, and Moose is not a man who takes no for an answer. He hauls Marlowe upstairs with him, breaks the manager's neck, and walks out.

That is the first murder, and Chandler makes a point of what happens next. The police lieutenant assigned to the case does not care. The victim was a Black man, and nobody downtown will spend time or newspaper space on him. The lieutenant leaves the legwork to Marlowe. The book's language about race is the language of 1940, including slurs, and it is uncomfortable to read. But its structure makes a pointed observation. One killing is ignored because of who died. The rest of the novel is about how much effort powerful people will spend protecting someone who matters.

Chandler published the novel with Knopf in 1940, a year after The Big Sleep. He wrote it in the second half of 1939, destroyed the typescript, and finished it the next spring. Like the first book, it was cannibalized from earlier stories, three this time. But it holds together better. Where The Big Sleep sprawls, Farewell, My Lovely has a spine. Everything comes back to Velma.

Marlowe goes looking for her. He finds Jessie Florian, the widow of the club's former owner, an alcoholic who tells him Velma is dead and who is clearly lying. Then the book swerves. A soft, perfumed man named Lindsay Marriott hires Marlowe as a bodyguard for a late-night payoff: a jade necklace has been stolen from a wealthy woman, and Marriott is delivering the ransom in a canyon off the coast highway. Marlowe gets hit on the head. When he wakes up, Marriott has been beaten to death.

A young woman named Anne Riordan, the daughter of a former police chief, finds them. She is smart, decent and plainly interested in Marlowe. She is also one of the few people in his novels he seems to like without reservation, which may be why he keeps her at arm's length.

The necklace belongs to Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle, the young wife of a very old and very rich man. When Marlowe meets her, Chandler gives him the line that has followed the book ever since: "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window." Mrs. Grayle drinks, flirts, and wants Marlowe working for her.

From here the novel becomes a tour of the corruption around Los Angeles. There is Jules Amthor, a psychic consultant who handles the secrets of rich women. There is Dr. Sonderborg, who runs a private hospital where Marlowe wakes up drugged and locked in after a beating. And there is Bay City, Chandler's fictional version of Santa Monica, a beach town whose police department is for sale. One of its cops is a slow, repetitive man Marlowe nicknames Hemingway, because he keeps saying the same thing over and over until it starts to sound important. It is a joke at a famous writer's expense, and also a sign of how much Chandler was thinking about style.

The last stretch takes Marlowe out to a gambling ship anchored beyond the three-mile limit, where city law cannot reach. He gets aboard with the help of a big former policeman named Red, who lost his job on the Bay City force for refusing to play along, to deliver a message to a racketeer and, through him, to Moose.

Without giving away more than necessary, the ending brings Moose and Velma into the same room. It turns out that Velma did not die. She reinvented herself, and the reinvention required that nobody from Central Avenue ever recognize her. Several people in this book die because they could have.

What lifts the novel is the strange moral weight it gives Moose. He is enormous, violent and not very bright. He kills a man with his bare hands. He is also the most loyal person in the book. He walked out of prison after eight years thinking about one woman. Everyone else around Velma, including the police and the rich, is willing to trade on her or for her. Moose only wants to see her. Chandler had married a woman eighteen years older than himself, against his mother's wishes, and stayed devoted to her for thirty years. He understood stubborn loyalty.

Marlowe ends the case more tired than triumphant. When Anne Riordan teases him about the classic detective scene where the sleuth explains everything, he says the case was not like that. "It's just dark and full of blood." In the final pages he learns how Velma's story ended, months later and far away in Baltimore, and he offers a generous reading of her last act: that she did it to spare the one man who had treated her decently. Then the book closes on a clear, cool day. You could see a long way, Marlowe says, but not as far as Velma had gone.

Farewell, My Lovely was filmed in 1944 as Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell, and again in 1975 with Robert Mitchum. Many readers rank it as Chandler's best novel, and the case is strong. It has his funniest writing, his most memorable characters and his clearest picture of a city where money decides which murders count.

It also clarified what Chandler thought he was doing. Next time, Book Report steps away from the novels to look at the essay where he laid it all out, and picked a fight with the English detective story. That is The Simple Art of Murder.