by Raymond Chandler
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Product Description
Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 One of the most brilliant narrative voices in the annals of literature, 2008-11-23
With the exception of Charles Dickens, has any writer has more influence on narration than Raymond Chandler? Dozens and dozens of writers -- not always crime writers -- have tried to sound like Philip Marlowe. Dozens of movies have featured Philip Marlowe-like narrators, including the theatrical release of BLADE RUNNER, where Rick Deckard sound nothing so much as a 21st Century updating. And perhaps there have been even more parodies. Either way, we all know what detective narrators are supposed to sound like, and we know this because of Raymond Chandler.
Raymond Chandler did not invent hardboiled detective fiction. He essentially took Dashiell Hammett's invention and focused nearly all his attention on prose style, character, and detail. There is an almost tactile quality to many of his stories, to the extent where you feel you could almost reach out and wipe the dust off a desk with your finger. There is, also, an almost wanton disregard of plot. If you read Raymond Chandler for plot, you are misreading him. I'll admit that in several of his novels I'm still unclear what happened. But who cares? The brilliance is in the texture, the detail. Take smell. Read virtually any other detective, crime, mystery, or hardboiled novel and look at how often other writers mention smells and then look at Chandler. He is constantly telling you what places smell like, whether mesquite or sage or sandalwood or whatever. Chandler wrote with heightened senses. I frankly can't get around to caring that his plots aren't very tight because other things absorb all my attention.
FAREWELL, MY LOVELY is one of my favorite Chandler novels, perhaps only behind THE BIG SLEEP and his flawed masterpiece THE LONG GOODBYE. It featured many of his most memorable characters, especially the doomed Moose Malloy, and many of his most unforgettable scenes. Because of Chandler's ability to sketch a scene in such astonishing detail, there are scenes in his books that are as easy to visualize as it is a scene in a movie. He is that vivid and precise in his depiction. A great example is Marlowe's visit to Mrs. Florian in his search for Velma. It would be a person of very poor imagination who didn't get a strong sense of what her house looked like, smelled like, felt like.
This is also one of his best books because it is one of the most tragic. The end of the novel feels almost like the end of Hamlet, with nearly all of the major characters either dead or at least shattered. And like with most of Chandler, there isn't an overly nice resolution of the mystery, whereby the detective magically makes everything nice and tidy and correct. Marlowe gets to the bottom of things, but often what he finds when he gets there is an abyss. And speaking of Chandler's influence, can one imagine the end of Raymond Polanski's CHINATOWN without Marlowe?
As a side note, there have been two very good film versions of FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. The first was made by RKO while Chandler was still alive and was originally released with that title. It tanked at the box office, mainly because it starred former Warner Brothers boy crooner Dick Powell. His style of musical had gone out of style and no one wanted to see what they assumed was a musical. So RKO renamed it MURDER, MY SWEET, which obviously could not be a musical, and re-released it. It was a box office success and was crucial in launching the second half of Dick Powell's career, this time as a serious dramatic actor. Chandler himself was horrified at the casting of Powell as Marlowe, but later proclaimed that he thought Powell was outstanding in the role. By the way, the person that Chandler himself thought would have made the ideal Marlowe was Cary Grant. The second version of FAREWELL, MY LOVELY was released in 1975 with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. With apologies to Humphrey Bogart, Mitchum is my favorite Marlowe. He was a tad too old for the role, but apart from that he absolutely nailed the cynicism and latent nobility of Marlowe. My only regret is that Mitchum didn't begin making a string of Marlowe films when he was 35. As it was he was too old in his second appearance as Marlowe in a bizarre version of THE BIG SLEEP set, of all places, in London.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Do not be misled, 2008-08-09
The vague product description on Amazon may lead you to think this product is an audiobook of Raymond Chandler's classic novel, _Farewell, My Lovely_, but it is not. It more closely resembles that of the radio programs of the 1940's-1950's, an art mastered by Orson Welles.
The dialogue on this CD shows good character, though often a bit exaggerated; this is common in radio performances as you have no other means of conveying emotion but inflection of voice. The plot of the CD mostly follows the book, but much has been omitted. The background soundtrack contains sound effects and music, though the level is well-balanced in effort to reduce the amount of distraction from the dialogue.
It is not substitute for the novel.
Raymond Chandler's novel, _Farewell, My Lovely_, may be one of his most stylistically clever works. Brimming with sarcasm, repressed anger and sexuality, and criticism of both upper and lower classes, Chandler's prose makes any audio adaptation challenging. For those who love old radio programs, this will do for a few hours enjoyment.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Lyrical Must-Read, 2008-06-01
According to Wikipedia, FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1940) was Raymond Chandler's second novel and created from three short stories--"The Man Who Liked Dogs" (1936), "Try the Girl" (1937), and "Mandarin's Jade" (1937). This makes a lot of sense to me, since Chandler's great creation, Philip Marlowe, seems more like a character from a short story than the deep and complex creation that a great novelist can achieve.
Yes, Marlowe is certainly a well-defined in FML. He's a guy with high integrity, down-beat and droll, lyrical in his descriptions, relentless and lonely, and he drinks too much. But why is he this way? And what greater issues do his struggles touch upon? Here, Chandler offers next to nothing, unless you have a film-Noir vision of life and view all winners as corrupt and brutal. Instead, he stays small with Marlowe, a highly focused creation developed in short stories, who offers a perfect streamlined literary voice to tell a novel-length story of crime.
This is not to say that Philip Marlowe is ever an uninteresting character in FML. But does he really have a very interesting mind? Take away his lyricism and the grouchy humor of his metaphors and his limits show--he's everybody's sour uncle, boyishly uncompromising, for whom things didn't work out.
Of course, you can't really separate character and voice in fiction. And, Marlowe's voice, its absolutely uncanny metaphors and amazing lyricism, explains why Raymond Chandler, among hundreds of crime-fiction writers, is the guy I choose to read. (I'm usually bored by mysteries and crime fiction.) Here are just two examples from FML.
"He wore a brown suit of which the coat was too small for his shoulders and his trousers were probably a little tight at the waist. His hat was at least two sizes too small and had been perspired in freely by somebody it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a weather vane...A tie dangled outside his buttoned jacket, a black tie which had been tied with a pair of pliers in a knot the size of a pea. ...He had a big flat face and a highbridged fleshy nose that looked as hard as the prow of a cruiser."
"Then there were no more houses, just the still dark foothills with an early star or two above them, and the concrete ribbon of road and a sheer drop on one side into a tangle of scrub oak and Manzanita where sometimes you can hear the call of the quails if you stop and keep still and wait. On the other side of the road was a raw clay bank at the edge of which a few unbeatable wild flowers hung on like naughty children that won't go to bed."
In FML, I also enjoyed the brief Hemingway parody and was surprised to encounter--SPOILER COMING--a multi-bullet suicide. This was something Martin Amis used to make a point about crime fiction in Night Train where the narrator is, like Philip Marlowe, burned out but amazingly lyrical.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
My curiosity was pretty well satisifed , 2008-05-27
Being a fan of "modern" mysteries, I always enjoy picking up a "classic" such as "Maltese Falcon" and "I,the Jury." THis was my first Chandler novel. I won't say I liked this book as much as the others mentioned yet reading it made me think of a dialog line from the first "National Treasure" film where Nicholas Cage reads the Declaration of Independence and says "they just don't talk like that anymore." The same holds true here; the characters, the way they talk, and the way a bottle of booze can take care of everything captures the time and makes you understand what made Chandler so revered up to this day.
As so many great novels do, the story line is secondary to you getting engrossed in the time period, the city of Los Angeles, the hero(??), private eye Philip Marlow, and those he meets up with. As some have mentioned, the plot seems somewhat disjointed early on. It almost borders on Quentin Tarantino movie territory in that you have to wait awhile for a couple of separate incidents to come together in order to grasp the entire story. Marlowe literally stumbles into the middle of a couple of murders and the women, bad guys, and good guys that Marlow comes across makes for a sometimes confusing yet very interesting novel.
A good novel but, for me, not as much fun as Spillane or engrossing as Hammett's classic work. Still, this is the kind of book you read, enjoy, and say as you are closing that book cover, "they don't make 'em like they used to."
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Seeing The World As It Really Is, 2007-12-19
This is the second Raymond Chandler novel I have read after "The Long Goodbye". I rarely ever read fiction but I can not overemphasize how much I enjoy reading Chandler's novels. These stories are most definitely NOT "page turners" and I mean that as a compliment. A "page turner" leaves the reader in suspense about what is going to happen or what is going to be revealed, often leading me, at least, to superficially scanning much of the prose in order to move ahead more quickly. There is some of this suspense in "Farewell My Lovely" (actually more than in "Goodbye" which spends more time philosophizing) but it is in taking every sentence as it comes, rolling it around in your mouth and savoring the flavor that gives the real pleasure in these novels.
What particularly stands out in this story is the shades of gray of everything. Whereas many detective stories try to fit all the pieces together at the end and show us good guys and bad guys, Chandler's protoganist PI Philip Marlowe sees the world in shades of gray. He doesn't attempt to get to the bottom of people's motivations, and that includes himself. At the beginning of the story, he sees a big white man enter a black nightclub and then sees a black man come flying out the door. For no apparent reason, and admitting that it was none of his business, Marlowe goes in to see what is happening and gets drawn into the mystery. We see people commit murders and yet Marlowe feels that they are not "all bad". Marlowe encounters some policemen who are good, some who are bad and some who are in the middle. In the end, Marlowe figures out more or less what happened, but admits there are holes in his theory, and he can't completely explain why the characters he encountered acted the way they did. This is the way the real world operates and Chandler/Marlowe is telling us to be honest with ourselves and to admit that we often don't know why we do the things we do and whether we are being really consistent.
I find it interesting to note that although this story was written almost 70 years ago, it shows a world that is pretty indistinguishable to our own. The story does not seem "dated". We see the materialist Los Angeles society that I grew up in during the 1960's and 1970's, and the type of people who live on its fringes. The only jarring note I encountered showing the changes in technology since 1940 was when Marlowe mentions he saw an "ice truck" parked on the street. Well, I guess time does move on.
In closing, this novel has one of the most famous Chandler-quotations of them all: "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."
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