::READERS REVIEWS::

Zingers Galore - For me the main pleasure of reading this novel derives from wisecracks zinging on almost every page. Here are a couple, plucked randomly:

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.
A bogus heartiness, as weak as a Chinaman's tea, moved into her face and voice.

And here is another one, a shot at Hemingway, as Marlowe explains a corrupt cop why he keeps calling him by that name: "A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good."

Hemingway may not be a great writer -- I'm not a big fan -- but he was a far better one than Chandler. That little charming fish story of his alone has (rightfully) much greater literary acclaim than all of Chandler's works put together.

Still, Raymond Chandler is a pleasure to read. He has a tremendous gift for storytelling. The wisecracks, the colorful characters, and the snappy dialogue make reading this novel, as well his other ones a pleasant experience, especially on lazy, boozy weekend afternoons. Nothing wrong with that.

Addictive... - I read mostly at night in bed and I'm tired because I could not put this book down. I kept looking ahead for convenient places to stop, but blew right by them instead. The combination of Chandler's pace and piquancy is simply irresistible.

Farewell, My Lovely isn't the most believable of books, but just like The Big Sleep, it doesn't matter. Indeed, there's a tongue-in-cheek charm that peeks out quite often from behind the hardened facade. Chandler excelled at caricature. He danced on the edge of parody. But, he did it so exquisitely well that he detracted not a whit from the earnestness of the story.

A paroled con comes back to LA in search of the woman he loves. Philip Marlowe, our protagonist, stumbles into the plot thus derived. Conspiracy and murder follow among the landmarks of the Los Angeles area. There's a magnetic pull to 40's-era LA and Chandler takes full advantage of it. Farewell, My Lovely is quintessential, it is provocative, and, in places, shamefully vulgar. And, still, I recommend it highly, because it is worth every bit of 5 stars.

One of the most brilliant narrative voices in the annals of literature - 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.

Do not be misled - 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.

A Lyrical Must-Read - 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.

What great writing is all about - This is the best book I have read in ages. I don't read everything start to finish. I like to be taken in, and to finish a book, I usually feel compelled to do so. This book had me eagerly flipping page after page. I couldn't wait to find out what would unfold next. It was the highlight of most of my recent days. Chandler's failed career as a romantic poet shows admirably in this prose. It's really beautiful, to the point, and not pretentious at all. It was fun. The pace was quick, and you are trying to put the pieces together with Marlowe as he brings you along. I don't usually read mysteries. With Chandler, I at least plan to read all of his. This is better than the best noir films. If you dig noir films and literature, read this book. (It's also clear why so many people idolize Marlowe from this one, a man's man if there ever was one...

good stuff - It's nice to read a mystery novel without all the blood and violence that are part of today's fiction. The writer's ability to create the suspense and keep the reader interested is what makes good novels. This is GOOD!