Farewell, My Lovely (Phillip Marlowe)

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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.

Malloy winds up killing someone in the bar and takes off, leaving Marlowe to explain things to the cops. Di mezzo, però, c’è la scomparsa dell’affascinante Vilma e lei è bianca e di questo sì che vale la pena occuparsi.If possible the plot/story-line of Farewell, My Lovely is even more convoluted than its predecessor, The Big Sleep. I don’t have time to reread books not with with such a tall TBR pile that continually beckons…and yet I do because that’s what the reading experience is all about.

He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. Marlowe is working a boring job trying to find a missing husband when he has the bad luck to come across Moose Malloy. Of the two, “fathers of noir”, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Chandler who I first read, and got a taste, perhaps an addiction, for noir. Chandler used this writing style to develop his themes of corruption, social decay, cynicism and fatalism.

Corrupt Bay City cops (you expect an LA story to feature the corrupt LAPD, but here it spreads to a neighboring community, maybe a fictionally named Santa Monica? Like all his novels, it has a memorable beginning, this time with Philip Marlowe spotting a man outside a bar wearing a sports coat with golfballs on it for buttons and alligator shoes with 'white explosions on the toes'.

Chandler takes you behind the bright lights in a tale of precious jewels, fading starlets, blackmail and murder, deadly poisons, dirty secrets hidden at the bottom of bourbon bottles, opulence and decadence in a dark place, illicit drugs and desperation. 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. 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 this case the three stories were "Try the Girl", "Mandarin's Jade", and "The Man Who Liked Dogs". I cannot remember what led me there, but I do remember at age fourteen I checked out Farewell, My Lovely from the public library.But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

However, Bogart only played Marlowe in the film adaptation of the first book in the series, The Big Sleep. Throughout the story, Chandler takes the reader in a multitude of directions and when Marlowe makes any sort of headway, a new element is introduced thus changing the case. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. Lewin ( Helen) Grayle but money doesn't smell, ( not always) things go dark and when Philip awakes at night in the lonely canyon, his client is no more.The story has all the elements Chandler is best known for biting humor, colorful characters that include gangsters and lawmen with violent streaks and hair-trigger temperaments, a keen insight into the sordid lives of society’s rich and powerful, and a private detective with a taste for alcohol and the soul of an avenging angel. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is so well known that most people already have a sense that he’s a tough guy whose emotional qualms are readily subdued by booze.