"I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. 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."
Farewell, My Lovely is entirely built of this type of prose, lyrical and purple at the same time. I discussed earlier how difficult it is to read a hard boiled detective tale because of the constant satirizing and diminishing returns of the genre. Still, after Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade, the quintessential L.A. hard case has got to be Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe. When a character is portrayed in film by people like Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart, you know he's tough.
Farewell, My Lovely was the second of Chandler's Marlowe novels. It follows a case of gambling, drugs, and murder in 1930s Los Angeles and environs. Along the way there are dames, psychics, disreputable cops and doctors, and a double cross or two for good measure. Chandler is particularly good at description and Marlowe in his first person narration is the conduit for these descriptions. Marlowe becomes enmeshed in the action by simple coincidence, but is able to play just the right moves in order to crack the case. Chandler hints at Marlowe's alcoholism without dwelling on it and also shows him to have racist tendencies. In fact, some of the racism is shocking to a modern reader, but is somehow different than that of the Tarzan novel. Here, the racist remarks are in keeping with the character, as opposed to being a simple premise that the action is based upon.
As with much of the genre, the mystery itself is no great shakes, but Chandler's writing is evocative and I'll look forward to reading more.
3 comments:
I believe Chandler did some personal research into alcoholism, but his are the only non-Baker St. detective novels I care for. He wrote too few, but they all have a jaded, burnt-out sensibility that's far more engaging than the mystery.
From just reading this one, I can agree with that statement regarding the 'feel' of the books as opposed to the actual 'action' in the books. I'm also really attracted to the Los Angeles of that time period, with the film L.A. Confidential being a big part of that. I may give the Walter Mosley detective novels with Easy Rawlins a shot as well.
You are so right. That noir-era LA, like "the old west" or Gotham City, is the fictional setting demanded by the story. I haven't read Mosley either, but am open to it if it gets a favorable review.
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