Farewell, My Lovely (Phillip Marlowe)

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Try the Girl" provided the initial story about a hoodlum looking for his old girlfriend who has moved on to a more respectable life. There's also a lot of beautiful landscape prose which can get missed and his attention to detail (or maybe Marlowe's) is impressive. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). 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. BBC Radio 4, as part of its Classic Chandler series, also broadcast on 19 February 2011 a dramatic adaptation by Robin Brooks, with Toby Stephens as the hardboiled detective.

Audience Question: You’re known for your essay on the Kantian aesthetic of disinterested judgment as seen in the works of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Dan Brown. The plot isn't quite as gripping as that of The Big Sleep but this is another stylish piece from Chandler as he erases the boundary between narrative voice and character - Marlowe is how he speaks: laconic, mordant, acidic, yet with a softer, vulnerable side as he is bludgeoned, shot at, captured and doped.Finally, there are the passages that aren’t just clever quips or snappy dialogue, but that convey a real sense of emotion. It's impossible to think of anything that might be remotely fresh and interesting to say about this book. I could, perhaps, talk more about how Philip Marlowe has spawned the long-lasting archetype for the gruff, wise-cracking broody and flawed detective with a heart of gold. In the opening episode of the television series Bored to Death, the character Jonathan Ames, played by Jason Schwartzman, is inspired to become a private detective after reading the book. I cannot remember what led me there, but I do remember at age fourteen I checked out Farewell, My Lovely from the public library.

This book is absolutely soaking in quotables and may have the best prose of any noir I’ve ever read. meeting pretentious quacks, political bosses dirty cops, drug pushing doctors visiting gambling boats off the coast, the rich creeps too even a "good girl", (who scares him ) and with little help to solve several murders. Thanks, then, to Penguin for reprinting Chandler's entire output in these handsome new covers with short and sweet introductions from contemporary crime hacks. 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.However it’s not long before another job falls in his lap when Marlowe is hired to accompany a man in a money-for-jewelry trade off. Raymond Chandler is one such author and while the case surrounding Farewell, My Lovely isn't particularly outstanding, he is certainly a masterful storyteller.

The novel is very well written and has an old-fashioned touch (busty blondes, crooked police officers, Italian mobsters), giving it a natural charm.

In 1944, Dick Powell played the part of the hard-boiled detective, named Philip Marlowe this time, in a classic film noir release—alternatively entitled Murder, My Sweet (in the United States) and Farewell, My Lovely (in the UK)—two years before cinema-goers saw Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946).