Farewell, My Lovely

“I thought of a lot of things. It got darker. The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling… I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room...”

What is it that so draws me into these novels? Have you read Raymond Chandler? He wrote Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, one year after crafting his masterful The Big Sleep. The exhaustingly lame schticks featuring solitary private detectives sitting behind their desks, cigarettes smoking through the slit-light of Venetian blinds are all pale shadows of Chandler’s Noir paladin, Phillip Marlowe. Here, in Chandler’s sodium-lit, Santa Ana scoured night streets of 1930’s Los Angeles, a truly 20^th century archetype is born… Something more than Byronic, he is our broken Lancelot, our Childe Rowland, yes, our Dante, and our street-running Leatherstocking with a gat. Ah, Marlowe… His name invokes stories told in the dark, our prow drifting down the widening estuary into the vast and savage night.

Chandler’s novels are written all in the first person, and Marlowe is our narrator. And oh, that voice… Marlowe transcends the merely hardboiled: he is eerily self-aware, a being of light in a sinner’s frame. The angels and demons about him discuss guts and brains and heart and blood and hate, but Marlowe knows only poetry:

“The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.”

His darkness is the seeping darkness of twentieth century cities, of Hopkins’ smeared and trodden world, of the rotten gridlines. But his victories are like no other – brilliantly individual – salvation, like suffering can only be personal. The darkness, in the end, sheds about him…

Am I making my case too strongly? Again, have you read Raymond Chandler?

In Farewell, My Lovely we follow Marlowe as he unravels the mystery of Moose Malloy. Chandler’s novel which begins in a lament over the second-class status of African Americans in 1930’s L.A, soon sees Marlowe slipping into a fog-drenched wonderland of gamblers and gigolos, predatory chorus girls, sea-spray and suburbs. Whole towns seem owned by mysterious kingpins berthed in offshore gambling palaces; allies arrive from unexpected quarters, and Marlowe suffers – oh, how he suffers – on the trail of a lost love, a job gone terribly wrong, a deadly mystic and Chinese jade. We meet Anne Riordan, Marlowe’s dark (or auburn as it were) angel. The eventual climax runs a whole quarter of the novel, and once Marlowe catches the scent, the final hunt is spellbinding.

When I write about Chandler, I run the risk of losing my footing in the crush of hyperbole. When people talk about “pulp” or “hardboiled” fiction, certain expectations arrange themselves. Chandler’s “hardboiled” is to his many imitators as a Bach organ concerto is to “chopsticks.” There I go again…