Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (1940)

Marlowe searches for a missing showgirl and it's off to the races.

Mystery Review: Farewell, My Lovely begins with a large, meaty fist and gets rougher from there. Marlowe is back after a chance meeting with the memorable and aptly named Moose Malloy, who is "not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck" and looking for his girlfriend. The husky Malloy doesn't get enough page time, but when he does appear the story jumps. Along the way Marlowe is beaten, drugged, and generally gets pummeled on a regular basis. A man he's protecting is killed, he loses his client's $8,000, and ends up locked in in an asylum. He's no superman, soon bordering on a nervous breakdown. But his failure makes him determined to do right by his dead client. We have pot, a psychic, gangsters, stolen jade, and more police corruption that you can shake a stick at (much of the story is set in corrupt and crime-ridden "Bay City," a thinly disguised Santa Monica). Through dogged (often foolhardy) persistence Marlowe figures it out. Have to admit, I should've seen the solution sooner, but I really didn't. Farewell, My Lovely doesn't have the (obvious) linear perfection of his first case, The Big Sleep, but is equally enjoyable as we get to know Marlowe better (he even understands the subjunctive tense). His snappy patter is sharper ("a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window") and the observation is hard-boiled ("She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket"). Marlowe nicknames a cop "Hemingway" because he "keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must me good." Meow! Have to mention that political correctness is not a thing here and the story shares the casual racism and bigotry of the day (especially as this was shortly before the Second World War). A side note: by 1940 the word "okay" hadn't achieved a standardized spelling, as here it's spelled "okey." Must've still been quite slangy. "Moral Rearmament" is also alluded to, a concept popular at the time but unknown to me. Farewell, My Lovely fulfills the promise of the first book and hints at more good things to come. Also filmed in 1944 as Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell (the original title sounding too much like a romance).  [5★]