Out in the 1940s Crime Noir Night –Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler, Vintage Crime Books, New York, 1940

Yah, I’ve mentioned before that there were some cases that our boy, our private eye, one Philip Marlowe should have walked away from, walked quickly away from. Like that case, the case he called the Little Sister, trap, uh, case up the Hollywood hills trying to protect a loose living rising young starlet tied up to a no good gangster that he almost lost his license (and his head) over and that some very unhappy L.A. (and Bay City) coppers are still stewing over. Of course he should have backed doff here too, although unlike that Hollywood caper nobody told him, or could tell him, to back off. Not at least when an ex-con named Moose, correctly named Moose, had his wanting habits, his Velma wanting habits on. And the gigantic size of him settled the matter, settled it no uncertain terms even when Moose said she hadn’t written him, written him up in stir in about six years. All the goliath said was his Velma would have her reasons. Sweet Jesus.

Sweet Jesus is right because before our boy Marlowe got through he had been beaten, drugged, framed and re-framed, shot at and almost swallowed whole. All for a woman who had no intentions, no intentions in hell, of going back to the Moose. She had moved on to the big time, stepped up in class, and was not going back to dives singing for nickels and dimes, putting up with cheap drunk hollers, and unwanted advances. She had changed her postal zone and worked her way up with a sweet walking daddy, a sweet old walking daddy, the best kind for the Velmas of the world. Why the hell do you think she hadn’t written the Moose in six years. And moreover but don’t tell him this although Marlowe figured it out pretty quickly had been the one who fingered him on his last bank job (that was why he did dime minus good behavior, what else). So no way, no way, was she looking to be found. And she had the wherewithal to be “unfound.”

“Unfound” except one Philip Marlowe, maybe kicking and screaming, or maybe later because he had grown “fond” of Moose, or maybe just because he was a guy used to chasing windmills in lost causes, chasing them wherever they led, was on the case. So he unwound the thing, went back to old days of Velma and Moose at the run down Florian Café over on Central Avenue in bygone days L.A. and worked his way forward. Worked his way forward though those previously mentioned beatings, a drugging (Christ he was seeing spiders and pin wheels while in the throes of that mess), a frame-up or two, some cop harassment, and no co-operation from the Moose other than the edict to find his precious Velma. So yes he found her, and yes, she was one of those classic femme fatales, and yes, as well she had to learn the Marlowe life lesson the hard way- “crime, doesn’t pay”.Read this little beauty to get the details of the twists and turns of Marlowe’s finding that damn Velma.

Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote the book. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett (the author of The Thin Man, and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Who, come to think of it, also had a judgment problem when it came to women, although not Hollywood women but up North in Frisco town) turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

In Chandler’s case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes.

The list of descriptions goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly, old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown building s on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down (that spill your guts thing a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of having). He had come from them, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.

At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and fauxgentility). He has a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high-ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back East looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s honor code.

And of course over a series of books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he honed back in the 1930s. Yes, Marlowe the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.