Mr. Philip Marlowe is six feet tall and weighing 190 lbs. man, women find quite attractive, maybe a tough guy to many onlookers in a sleazy and a low -paying occupation too, but is not a superhero, no eyes in the back of the head when someone smashes his skull with a club from behind, bigger stronger men can and do beat him to a bloody pulp, still the private detective is relentless and will get up... A kind of honestly is his code, yet does bend a little for his needs... constantly smoking ciga...

What can I say? I absolutely loved the style and imagery. I mean, SERIOUSLY loved it. Marlowe is the quintessential hard-boiled detective who is suspicious of everyone, especially the dames, clients, cops, and thugs... but he has a pretty good understanding with the thugs. The tale is fun and familiar, partly because Chandler paved the road for the best of what we know of Noir, but moreover, it's just GOOD. Snappy. Sarcastic. So VERY colorful.And because -- let's be fair -- this came out in 1940...

Farewell, My Lovely (Philip Marlowe, #2), Raymond ChandlerFarewell, My Lovely is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1940, the second novel he wrote featuring the Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. It was adapted for the screen three times and was also adapted for the stage and radio.Private detective Philip Marlowe is investigating a dead-end missing person case when he sees a felon, Moose Malloy, barging into a nightclub called Florian's, looking for his ex-girlfriend Velma Valento....

Philip Marlowe is looking for a woman's missing husband when he encounters Moose Malloy, a brute fresh out of prison, looking for his lost love Velma. Moose kills a man and Marlowe gets corralled into looking for the missing Velma. In the mean time, Marlowe gets another gig as a bodyguard and soon winds up with a corpse for a client. Will Marlowe find Velma and get to the bottom of things?As I've said before, noir fiction and I go together like chronic constipation and heroin addiction. Farewell...

Excerpts from a dinner honoring the 2016 winner of the Otis Chandler Award for Literary Criticism Audience Question: You’re known for your essay on the Kantian aesthetic of disinterested judgment as seen in the works of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Dan Brown. Are there other authors or titles that come to mind, perhaps even more focused on the primacy of style?Steve: Well, let’s see… Maybe the first book I read where a certain shadowy deportment really popped as a pure statement of style

Not as complicated as it seems or as Chandler would like you to believe. And that's a-okay! I love a little private dick action and this is perfectly satisfying!This story of a thug getting out of prison and trying to find his girl is fairly straightforward, but Raymond Chandler throws a bucketload of red herrings into Farewell, My Lovely in an attempt to throw you, dear reader, off the trail. Stick to the yellow brick road, Dorothy, and you'll figure it all out in short order. Fresh off The Big...

In this his second adventure, private detective Philip Marlowe – more or less in between cases – pokes his inquisitive nose where it doesn’t belong. Encountering a behemoth of an ex-con, Moose Malloy, on the street, Marlowe follows the big man into a bar and witnesses a murder. And before the reader can ask, “Where’s my Velma?” – the question makes sense when you read the novel – Marlowe finds himself embroiled in police corruption, a blackmail scam, chasing a gang of jewelry thieves, another mu...

Philip Marlowe is a combination many of my favorite crime busters. John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, Lee Child's Jack Reacher, and Jo Nesbø's, Harry Hole (to name a few).Like Reacher, Harry, and Travis, Marlowe is also incredibly funny, smart and can take care of business with confidence when the situation warrants. Always get a huge kick out of how he handles his lady suitors, calling a spade a spade like nobody's business. He is never lured in with mindless flirtation, and listening to him use...

Definitely my favorite Chandler, beating out The Big Sleep by a star and more than a dozen memorable lines. This book is absolutely soaking in quotables and may have the best prose of any noir I’ve ever read. Add in a classic main character and a solid plot and you have a nice shiny bundle of win. PHILIP MARLOWE: Chandler’s iconic PI is an arrogant alcoholic who fails every PC test you can formulate. He’s racist (from what I recall he insults African-Americans, Japanese and Native Americans and...

3.5 starsA very uneven successor to The Big Sleep, but truly brilliant in part. If I were to make a movie from a book, this would be The One. 😃The first 1/4 is quite slow, clumsy even (see below). But then it quite suddenly gets wonderful. I wish I could know what happened to Chandler to wake him up. The prose suddenly soars.Update: It turns out this book is a (clumsy) conglomeration of three of Chandler’s previous short stories: 1. Moose looking for Velma (poor)2. A stolen jade necklace (adequa...

First of all I'm so partial to R.Chandler's books that I'd easily give only the titles three stars,and this gem is definitely a five-star title.Apart from this sentimental love-and-hate story,I’m ALWAYS impressed by the characters speaking like they carry a book of wit and humor,to the point that I’ll start picking up sharp-edged setences from here and add them to my daily conversation.The plot is a bit comlicated with rugged and overused narrative and minor parts,but the main irresistible chara...

"She's a nice girl. Not my type.""You don't like them nice?" He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand."I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin."Hey, copper, it's how I talk, see? MahhhhhhThis was exactly what the doctor ordered after a blitz of wonderful yet terribly earnest books, one after the other. This classic noir was everything I needed. A handsome private dick (ahem), a heist of some rare jade jewels, mysterious beauties,...

Phillip Marlowe is one of the most famous and influential characters in detective fiction. 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.But he’s also the guy that says things like this:"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."And this:"He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."And t...

Fabulous! Philip Marlowe is the man! He gets quite knocked about in this story, which was good enough for me not to guess what was going on until I was told. And that is good enough for me!Anne, a side kick character in this story sums up the story and Marlowe like this:You’re so marvellous,’ she said. ‘So brave, so determined, and you work for so little money. Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting betw...

I love Goodreads it has really enhanced my reading experience. And at the same time added to my anxiety. There are too many great books to read. I have at least 3k physical books on my TBR pile in my office that has really turned into a book storage space. When another reader posts something about one of my favorite books, I stop and think about how much I loved that book. That’s what happened recently with Farewell My Lovely. I dropped what I was reading and read it again. I don’t have time to

Review updated on November 17, 2021.During a boring routine case Philip Marlowe stumbled upon a huge (really huge) guy dressed the way which would make any peacock die of jealousy. “Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” He seemed to be looking for a long-lost girlfriend doing this with a grace and persistence of a charging rhinoceros. Marlowe decided to stick with the guy having nothing bet...

It's impossible to think of anything that might be remotely fresh and interesting to say about this book. It's a classic of crime fiction; it was first published in 1940, and it's been reviewed thousands of times, mostly by people far more competent than I.Suffice it to say that this is the second full-length novel featuring Los Angeles detective Philip Marlowe, following The Big Sleep, which had been published in 1939. Marlowe was the prototype for all the tough, wise-cracking P.I.s that would

Down These Mean StreetsWhen you open up any dictionary and you look up the phrase Hardboiled private eye, you'll find it defined right there in black and white as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. If much of the book seems familiar, it may be that you read it many years ago or that so many of the motifs were borrowed and used by so many other private eye writers over the years. But if you want to know how it's really done, you return to the master Hardboiled craftsman himself. I always picture

“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.”While working a missing persons case, Detective Philip Marlowe finds himself drawn into a murder investigation. Jailbird Moose Malloy knocks off the proprietor of a local watering hole in his pursuit of a gal named Velma. While assisting the cops in hunting him down, Marlowe backs off the case when he realizes he...

I wish I had Lauren Bacall's looks and a mouth as salty as Phillip Marlowe's. The characters are such great throw backs to the days when men were Men and women were Dames. Chandler's writing is amazingly rich for this genre and the plot lines are just convoluted enough to keep you guessing. Phillip Marlowe is a great faceted character which contrasts nicely against the one-dimensional villains, cops and women who populate the stories. If authors like Sue Grafton are the gummi bears of the genre