Raymond Chandler - Farewell My Lovely

Raymond Chandler's second book Farewell, My Lovely (1940)  featured the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe. For me the story rivals Chandler's first book The Big Sleep. My first contact with Farewell, My Lovely was as a teenager when I saw the Dick Powell movie version, Murder, My Sweet. I still enjoy that movie.

Some know that Chandler created Farewell, My Lovely, by piecing together three of his short stories: Try The Girl (1937), Mandarin's Jade (1937), and The Man Who Liked Dogs (1936). I have read these short stories and enjoy them very much. Mandarin's Jade is my favorite of the three because it is a good story with interesting characters: the psychic, his exotic secretary and the Indian, not to mention the femme fatale.

Not all the great lines from the novel are in the short story, but some of them are:

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

Her smile was older than Egypt now

Comparing Mandarin's Jade and Farewell, My Lovely is something like comparing a second draft to a finished draft. In Mandarin's Jade Chandler describes the psychic's eyes:

    His black eyes were as shallow as a cafeteria tray or as deep as a hole to China - whichever you like.

It's good, I like it. This is how Chandler describes his eyes in Farewell, My Lovely.

    His eyes were deep, far too deep. They were the depthless drugged eyes of a somnambulist. They were like a well I read about once. It was nine hundred years old, in an old castle. You could drop a stone in it and wait. You could listen and wait and give up waiting and laugh and then just when you were ready to turn away a faint, minute splash would come up back to you from the bottom of that well, so tiny, so remote you could hardly believe a well like that was possible.
    His eyes were deep like that. And they were also eyes without expression, without soul, eyes that could watch a lion tear a man to pieces and never change, that could watch a man impaled and screaming in the hot sun with his eyelids cut off.

WOW!

Some might think; read the novel, it's better than the short stories. On one hand they would be right, but on the other hand there are some scenes in the short stories that did not make it into the novel. It would be a shame to miss them.

Here is a description of a bar the detective Dalmas is about to enter moments before a shootout.

    I could see the Hotel Tremaine's sign over the narrow door between two storefronts, both empty -- an old two-storey walkup. Its woodwork would smell of kerosene, its shades would be cracked, its curtains would be of sleazy cotton lace and its bed-springs would stick into your back. I knew all about places like the Hotel Tremaine, I slept in them, staked out in them, fought with bitter, scrawny landladies in them, got shot at in them, and might get carried out of one of them to the morgue wagon. They are flops where you find the cheap ones, the sniffers and pin-jabbers, the gowed-up runts who shoot you before you can say hello.

The great thing about short stories is they only have so much space to tell a story. The writing is nice and tight. One thing I did notice in Farewell, My Lovely, (and in The Big Sleep) is that some scenes appear to be fillers, and repeat information.

Even if you are not a big Chandler fan, the short stories are worth reading as well as the novel. The short stories do not end exactly the same as the novel. So whether you read the novel or short story, if it's Raymond Chandler, you can't lose.

Stephen Gaspar's books can be found on Amazon! Click here!