Throughout the story, Chandler takes the reader in a multitude of directions and when Marlowe makes any sort of headway, a new element is introduced thus changing the case. It’s often a wonder Marlowe gets anything done when half the time he’s soaking himself in bourbon while seemingly trying to burn bridges with his smarmy attitude and general distaste for anyone he meets. Nobody can write like Chandler on his home turf, not even Faulkner. . . . An original. . . . A great artist.”— The Boston Book Review Lehman, David. “Hammett and Chandler.” In The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection. New York: Free Press, 1989. Chandler is represented in this comprehensive study of detective fiction as one of the authors who brought out the parable at the heart of mystery fiction. A useful volume in its breadth and its unusual appendices: one a list of further reading, the other, an annotated list of the critic’s favorite mysteries. Includes two indexes, one of concepts and one of names and titles.

But, you always get the mean streets of Los Angeles no matter how you picture Marlowe. These streets range from the seedy joints lining Central Avenue to the estates in Beverly Hills and Brentwood Heights. The streets lead of course to Chandler's fictional Bay City, loosely based on what was a crooked Santa Monica right down to the gambling boats three legal miles offshore. Think that over. And who would that trial hurt most? Who would be least able to bear it? And win, lose or draw, who would pay the biggest price for the show? An old man who had loved not wisely, but too well." A very uneven successor to The Big Sleep, but truly brilliant in part. If I were to make a movie from a book, this would be The One. 😃 Update: It turns out this book is a (clumsy) conglomeration of three of Chandler’s previous short stories:

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room' in Marlowe’s dressing room. Marlowe accuses Grayle of killing Marriott, and Grayle pulls a gun on Marlowe. Malloy comes out of the closet because he recognizes Helen Grayle’s voice as that of Velma Valento, his lost love. He suddenly realizes that she was the one who betrayed him to the police eight years previously. Grayle shoots Malloy five times in the stomach, then escapes and disappears. Malloy dies.

There's also a lot of beautiful landscape prose which can get missed and his attention to detail (or maybe Marlowe's) is impressive. There is a scene where he watches a little bug moving round the office and it's really quite funny and observant. a b The great movie money show. Michael Pye. The Sunday Times (London, England), Sunday, July 13, 1975; pg. 47; Issue 7935. What can I say? I absolutely loved the style and imagery. I mean, SERIOUSLY loved it. Marlowe is the quintessential hard-boiled detective who is suspicious of everyone, especially the dames, clients, cops, and thugs... but he has a pretty good understanding with the thugs. When embarking on a night’s work he makes the observation, “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”A convoluted series of mini-mysteries all stemming from Marlowe’s search for the ex-girlfriend of a just released from prison man-mountain named Moose Malloy. Fairly typical noir stuff but very well executed and paced to perfection by Chandler.

Host: I’m afraid we may be veering off course as litterateurs, my friends. This isn’t an episode of I Love Lucy, after all. Should we redirect ourselves? Steve?

Farewell, my lovely

Philip Marlowe is looking for a woman's missing husband when he encounters Moose Malloy, a brute fresh out of prison, looking for his lost love Velma. Moose kills a man and Marlowe gets corralled into looking for the missing Velma. In the mean time, Marlowe gets another gig as a bodyguard and soon winds up with a corpse for a client. Will Marlowe find Velma and get to the bottom of things?

See what I mean? This is what distinguishes him from other crime/noir writers. He’s entertaining and just plain good. But as with The Big Sleep, the plot is convoluted to the point where I won’t even recount it, except to say: a woman named Velma is never physically present in this book, but she is the figure that moves it forward, the thread in the fabric one has to pull to unravel the whole cloth of the plot. Such as it is.Tre stelle per aver dato i natali al genere hard boiled dimostrando coraggio nel descrivere la corruzione morale in un’epoca di censure. Un autore amato come dimostrano commenti e votazioni dei lettori ma probabilmente non è il genere di lettura che mi manda in estasi. a b c d Ebert, Roger (June 17, 1975). "Robert Mitchum: "Bring me a Miltown, sweetheart." ". Roger Ebert. Jim Thompson, author of popular crime novels like The Getaway and The Grifters, appears in the film as Judge Grayle. Many of Thompson's novels were filmed as major motion pictures.