A Tarantula on a Slice of Angel Food

Farewell, My Lovely
by Raymond Chandler
1940, Alfred A. Knopf


As often as I read now as an adult, I feel that my childhood and early adolescence was a period of much more frenzied consumption of books. Mystery novels played an enormous part in my precocious interest in novels.

I remember, for example, in kindergarten or first grade consuming Encyclopedia Browns faster than my library could acquire them. Later, in fifth through seventh grade, I delved enthusiastically into Agatha Christie's oeuvre, borrowing decades-old paperbacks from my great Aunts when the library's stock inevitably failed to meet my needs.

As a teenager, my interest in genre writing was supplanted by my fervor for "literary" works; I'm sad to say that with only four exceptions, I gave away all of my Agatha Christies. In my adulthood, I'm rather ashamed to say that I can count on one hand the number of times I've browsed through a science fiction or mystery section in a bookstore.

Recently, though, I was shopping at a store called Savers in Nashua (ostensibly an upscale Salvation Army) and came across three beautiful Vintage paperbacks of Raymond Chandler novels. I had very recently watched Robert Altman's 1973 Marlowe film The Long Goodbye and so it was with a great deal of excitement that I picked up Farewell, My Lovely and got lost in Chandler's brittle prose.

The actual plot of Farewell, My Lovely is enormously convoluted, but in the most delightful way. The story begins in a seedy bar where a murder occurs and careens from boozy broads and closeted homosexuals to sham psychics and odious doctors. Chandler weaves the story out of these seemingly disparate characters and plot strands, and eventually your seemingly split attention is rewarded as the the strands wind together and produce a coherently sensible conclusion.

This, of course, does not necessarily mean that the bulk of the novel is any more coherent for its conclusive ending. Marlowe bounces from one cinema-ready location to another: dive bars, mysterious hillside mansions, psychiatric hospitals, a floating casino accessible only by boat (a la One-Eyed Jack's). But the inherent confusion in following Marlowe follow leads that don't seem to connect, in moving from one seedy location to another, increasingly signifies a thematic interest in the inherent disconnect of contemporary urban life: the surprising and incongruous neighborhoods and cultures that coalesce and confuse.

The setting, then, is clearly important in understanding the dark undertow that flows beneath the tranquil, picturesque surface of genre. The raging tumult of Los Angeles, its over-population, its ready availability of venues for vice, is no stranger to thematic extrapolation, but when Chandler utilizes the borderline proverbial godlessness of L.A. in tandem with the mess of a plot at work in Farewell, My Lovely the subsequent feelings of confusion give way to fatalism.

Marlowe emerges then as a tragic hero of sorts, fighting to bring sense in his small, defeated way to the overwhelming futility of life in this landscape. He is beaten and bitter this superficial resignation to hopelessness is undermined by his doggedness in his single-minded pursuit of justice. Hoping to make sense in a senseless world makes him naive and yet incredibly heroic; he becomes the sort of man with whom one falls in love. As I read Chandler, Bogart with his endless charm and swagger became an increasingly sensible casting choice.

In truth the underlying thematic portrait of the 1930s lends intellectual merit to the experience of reading Chandler. It justifies what is otherwise a dime store crime novel. But rest assured this is not a novel that necessitates justification, it is one that inspires devotion. Marlowe is intoxicating. Chandler's prose is dizzying. These feats of inspiration require no justification - only slavish devotion.

Let me provide you with some rather dizzying examples of the acrobatic derring-do (most of which take the form of those trusty workhorses simile and metaphor) on display in Chandler's otherwise modest construction:

- "His smile was as cunning as a broken mousetrap."
- "He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."
- "He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth."
- "It was a lovely bed. It was made of roseleaves. It was the most beautiful bed in the world. They got it from Carole Lombard. It was too soft for her."
- "Time passed again. I don't know how long. I had no watch. They don't make that kind of time in watches anyway."
- "I was a hundred dollar package of dynamite that went off with a noise like a pawnbroker looking at a dollar watch."
- "His voice sounded full of baked potato."

These randomly selected examples inspire awe. Giddiness. And they don't take the delicious dialogue into account either.

Chandler constructs with his prose another world where such diction is not merely clever but is true. He imbues the entire novel with this air of unreality, poisoning his reader against more staid and stale forms of expression. Moreover, this disconnected, ostentatious prose further serves to create an enveloping sense of becoming lost in Chandler's world. Chandler remakes the world with every bewitching sentence, breaking apart the familiar concepts of character, mystery, climax, stereotype and reassembling them into something wonderfully unique.

Ultimately, Farewell, My Lovely is a delicious confection of hard-boiled mystery. Its gritty and bombastic prose is addictive and the plot is absorbing and falls into place just in time to reward its readers' attention. Most of all, Marlowe is the type of striking character who lingers in your mind long after the book is over, lingering behind street corners in a cloud of cigarette smoke waiting for you to look his way.