Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
Author: Raymond Chandler
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf
Synopsis:
A bank robber recently released from jail is looking for his old flame and he hires Philip Marlowe to do it, only the case becomes a lot bigger than he is prepared for.
Impressions:
While most of the major plot beats are the same, the two main film adaptations of this story are quite different, so I wanted to go to the source and see how it all compared. More so than in The Big Sleep, you can really tell this was cobbled together from multiple short stories as the plot gets needlessly complicated. At least one or two threads could have stood to be trimmed to make for a more streamlined experience. However, credit where credit's due, most of the pieces fit together and the ones that don't you could argue adds some verisimilitude as real-life investigations are almost never neat and tidy and there are going to be plenty of false leads and cold trails along the way. Chandler himself apparently was more interested in portraying the environment of corruption more than crafting a seamless narrative, and on that count he succeeds quite well. The world he crafts is a rather miserable one and yet our protagonist keeps on taking his lumps and sticking to his guns all for his measly twenty-five bucks a day plus expenses. The ending is quite a bit different from either film adaptation, so you might find that interesting if you're coming to this last. Overall, I feel The Big Sleep is a stronger story, but if you like hardboiled detective fiction, you'll want to give this a read. And, hey, you might even learn a few new slurs out of it. What a deal.
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