Farewell My Lovely Phillip Marlowe. A novel by Raymond Chandler

By this time, I’m quite familiar with Chandler’s quick-witted style, Phillip Marlowe’s stoic but sardonic demeanour and the platinum glossy California painted in the pages of these novels. But it doesn’t mean that it got me bored. If Chandler had written a hundred Marlowe novels, I wouldn’t have minded reading them all. There remains two to be ticked off now: Little Sister and Playback, but I’m in absolutely no rush to find and finish them.

Farewell My Lovely have all these essentials elements and in some ways it varies little to the other novels: the dame(s), the big tough guy, the quack doctor, the crooked cops. For many, Farewell My Lovely is their favourite Marlowe novel, for whatever reason. But I felt that it is one of the weakest Marlowe books out there, not because of my overfamiliarity of the character, but I feel that it is a bit of a messy work, relying too much on plot-driven coincidences and an explanation in the end that I’m not 100% sure makes sense or not.

Marlowe in trouble, again. Gets mixed up with the wrong crowd, again.

While on the job of finding a missing husband, Marlowe ran into a big white dude who’s visiting African American bars. Moose Malloy had just recently been released from prison and he was in the quest to search for his old sweetheart, Velma. The black bar was a long time ago non-black bar, but had since been out of business and taken over by new management. Malloy, getting into an altercation with the owner of the bar, ended up murdering him and getting away.

The cops Marlowe reported the incident to were cooperative enough, but made Marlowe do the legwork for them, especially in investigating where Velma might be. So down the rabbithole Marlowe goes, taking him to the wife of the ex-owner of the bar, a Mrs Florian, who by this time is all washed up like dry seaweed in Cottesloe Beach. Velma, according to her, had died of consumption.

As he was wrapping this up, with Malloy still on the loose, he received a call from a dandy, Lindsay Marriott who paid him some extra cash to be his muscle in a repurchase of a stolen good, a famous Chinese jade necklace. At the rendezvous, the dandy was murdered with his brains splattered all over his face, and Marlowe knocked out cold.

Finding a namecard of a dodgy shrink in Marriot’s cigarette mouthpiece, Marlowe followed this trail when a stinky native American dude picked him up to see the doc. From here, a confusing series of comedy of errors where Marlowe is the perpetual victim ensues: getting knocked out a couple of times (again), getting beat up by crooked cops, locked up in a dodgy asylum. Things don’t look too flash hot for Marlowe and he’s nowhere nearer on finding Malloy and the elusive Velma. But these two seemingly separate storylines tie in somehow, and as always, Marlowe’s the fulcrum in between intertwining plots.

Where does that sentimentality take you, Mr Marlowe?

With a title that is more fitting for romance novels for fifty year olds, Farewell My Lovely is one of the grittier Chandler novels. As I mentioned, there are similar elements to other Chandler novels, though it does not feel gimmicky or repetitive. But out of all the Marlowe novels, this may be the most sentimental, in terms of the character’s actions and motivations. Much of the character’s decisions were illogical, borderline selfless (if we could call it that) and missing a logical end, Marlowe attributes these actions to sentimentality.

For example, old man Grayle turning a blind eye to his wife’s indiscrete affairs; Moose Malloy searching for his Velma to the point of murdering two innocent bystanders; Velma not involving her husband in her escape to oblivion, proving that she might have a smidgen of humanity. But as we know, the most sentimental character is Marlowe, who took on the search of Velma not for himself, but to put Moose Malloy’s restlessness to bed.

Marlowe’s actions scratch the reader’s heads at the best of times, until we realise that he’d do anything for the sake of the people he has a good gut feeling for, even if the acquaintances are mere and fleeting. We would be more familiar with this sentimental side of Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. This is why, after five Marlowe novels thus far, I still am glad to read his character and his decision-making which often would proverbially shoot himself in the foot. They don’t make them like they used to.

Hitting the right balance between cynicism and poetry

Farewell My Lovely is the showcase of Chandler’s quick-witted style with a gem per page higher than his other works. It hits the balance between cynicism and poetry, while all the time moving the plot forward, reflective of the first person narrative that we hear from Marlowe’s viewpoints:

“The bouncer was moving. He was moving slowly as if with great pain and effort. He was crawling softly along the baseboard like a fly with one wing.”

Or:

“She has weedy hair with vague colour that was neither brown nor blond, that hasn’t enough life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clear enough to be grey. Her body was thick in a shapeless outing flannel bathrobe many moons past colour and design.”

But like any other Chandler novel, there is that yearning for beauty and the gladness for it, indicative of Marlowe’s sentimentality. Even descriptive passages like these are pure poetry:

“The house was a cheerful spot by daylight. Tea rose begonias made a solid pale mass under the front windows and pansies a blur of colour around the base of a white acacia in bloom. A scarlet climbing rose was just opening its buds on a fan-shaped trellis. There was a bed of winter sweet peas and a bronze-green humming bird prodding in them delicately. The house looked like the home of a well-to-do elderly couple who liked to garden. The late afternoon on it had a hushed and menacing stillness.”

I can’t help but think of my favourite book, The Little Prince, in a passage mentioning the difference between adults who’d judge the value of a house by its price tag compared to those who’d judge it by its beauty, in a description similar to the one above. Marlowe no doubt belongs to the second category and we’re the better for it.

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Underneath the gloss and glamour of California is an ugly underbelly, we all know that. But underneath that grotesque layer is another subtle but rare part — the sentimentality of people which prove their humanity, even in their darkness. Marlowe is in an incessant journey to prove this humanity, but to whom I don’t really know. Is he then a tragic hero in the vein of Sherlock Holmes, who despite his genius is unable to prove human motivation? Whatever the answer, I’m not ready to say farewell to Phillip Marlowe just yet.