Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

First published: 1940

Type of plot: Detective mystery

Time of work: The late 1930’s

Locale: Los Angeles and Santa Monica, called Bay City in the novel

Principal Characters:

• Philip Marlowe, a private investigator
• Anne Riordan, a writer of feature articles and the daughter of a former police chief of Bay City
• Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle, the beautiful blonde wife of a rich investment banker much older than she
• Moose Malloy, the catalyst of the story, an ex-convict recently released and in search of his former girlfriend

The Novel

As the novel begins, private investigator Philip Marlowe is standing outside a barbershop in Los Angeles, at a dead end on a case concerning a missing husband. His attention is caught by the sight of a huge, outrageously dressed man a few feet down the street. As Marlowe watches, the man swaggers into a building identified by its sign as Florian’s, a dining and gambling club. Before the double swinging doors can come to a stop, the body of a man hurtles out onto the street. Even as he concedes to himself that the incident is none of his business, Marlowe, his curiosity piqued, moves to the doors and attempts to enter. Before he can do so, however, a huge hand grabs his shoulder and drags him inside.

In short order, Marlowe learns that the big man is Moose Malloy, just out of prison, where, he insists, he was sent on a trumped-up bank-robbery charge. Malloy is now searching for his girlfriend, Velma Valento, who used to sing in Florian’s eight years earlier. After telling Marlowe this, Malloy forces his way into the office of the club’s manager. Seconds later, sounds that turn out to be those of the novel’s first murder reverberate throughout the club. Malloy holds everyone at bay with a gun as he makes his escape, leaving Marlowe to deal with the dead body and the indifferent police inquiry that follows.

The opening scenes of the novel are perfect harbingers of what occurs throughout the rest of the story. Marlowe’s curiosity, his desire to know, and Malloy’s brute strength have combined irresistibly to involve the detective in a search for Malloy and the woman he loves.

At the heart of the novel is Malloy’s search for Velma and the ramifications it engenders. As Marlowe conducts his own investigation, it seems to him as if all the ramifications are aimed directly at him in a conspiracy to silence him, a conspiracy of such proportions as to include Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle (Helen), the wife of a rich and powerful society figure; Jules Amthor, a psychic consultant who defrauds rich, gullible society matrons; a shadowy drug peddler named Dr. Sonderberg; and Laird Brunette, the rackets boss and powerful political manipulator of Bay City.

Before Marlowe, with the help of Anne Riordan, can make sense of what is happening and why, a client of his is murdered while Marlowe lies unconscious; he is beaten up by Amthor and two Bay City policemen; he is drugged and imprisoned at Sonderberg’s so-called sanatorium; he is threatened by Brunette; and he is almost seduced by Helen Grayle.

As Marlowe slowly amasses evidence, he comes to the realization that only his client’s death and Helen Grayle’s actions are related to Malloy and Velma. The others act against Marlowe in self-protection, to prevent him from coming too close to their own schemes; it is not a conspiracy after all. Once Marlowe realizes this, he confronts Helen Grayle in his apartment with circumstantial evidence that implicates her in the death of his client and her friend, Lindsay Marriott. As they talk, Moose Malloy, who has come to Marlowe’s apartment in reply to a message that Marlowe left with Laird Brunette, recognizes Helen Grayle’s voice as Velma’s. He comes into the room and greets Velma warmly. When Velma replies with an obscenity and points a gun at him, Moose is stopped short by the sudden realization that Velma is the one who turned him in on the bank-robbery charge eight years earlier. Velma empties her gun into Malloy and, before Marlowe can stop her, escapes from the apartment. Malloy dies, and three months later Velma is spotted in Baltimore, but before she can be captured she kills a detective and commits suicide. The novel ends with Marlowe offering an explanation for Velma’s suicide. Though he admits that it is sentimental, he believes that Velma died in order to spare her husband the humiliation and embarrassment of a trial, in a sense repaying the only man who ever treated her decently. For Marlowe this answer is plausible; he is also capable of such sentimental and romantic acts. Velma’s final act and Malloy’s fatal search for his love, in a world of so much pettiness and murder, have a redemptive air about them to Marlowe, no matter how slim and sentimental the thought may be.

The Characters

Philip Marlowe has long been regarded as the prototypal private investigator. Countless practitioners of the genre have liberally borrowed for their central characters the qualities with which Chandler endows Marlowe: honor, pride, a sense of humor, a sense of character, and an inborn, intense curiosity about people and situations. This last quality is what draws Marlowe to Moose Malloy initially and what (along with the other qualities) propels him forward during his investigation.

By using Marlowe as the narrator, Chandler allows his character’s salient features to appear through Marlowe’s thoughts, actions, opinions, and descriptions. A perfect example of this occurs when Anne Riordan shows him a picture of Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle and Marlowe sees her as “a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” Though this assessment of her proves to be most accurate, it does not prevent him from participating, at first, in her attempted seduction of him. Marlowe’s sense of fair play prevails, and he immediately leaves when her husband walks in. Yet this makes no difference to Mrs. Grayle; she tells Marlowe to forget about her husband.

This is not a woman born to wealth or to high social standing, as Marlowe soon finds out. Indeed, Mrs. Grayle is Velma Valento, the object of Malloy’s search, a woman perfectly capable of killing to protect what she has acquired. Shrewd and calculating, she is quick to act and acts decisively. She is willing to pay when Lindsay Marriott, who knows everything about her, blackmails her, but, as soon as she perceives that should Malloy or Marlowe put pressure on him he would lead them to her, she kills him in a way that convinces both Marlowe and the police that it was done by a gang of jewel thieves.

Yet she is capable of inspiring love. Moose Malloy, strong and none too bright, loves her enough to search for her even though he has not heard from her in years, convinced that she loves him just as much as he loves her. It is not until he confronts her in Marlowe’s apartment that he realizes finally that it was she who turned him in to the police. The shock prevents him from using his gun, and Velma shoots him several times. Though the ambulance attendants assert that Malloy has a chance to live, Marlowe knows that, now that his dream has been shattered, Malloy will not want to survive. Malloy dies later that night.

The other man who loves Velma, Lewin Grayle, protects her even after he realizes that she is a murderer. He refuses to provide information such as her real name (Velma Valento is another alias) and when and where they were married, and he insists that he does not know where she has gone. He has protected her identity through the years of their marriage, and he sees no reason to cease protecting her now.

The other major female character in Farewell, My Lovely is Anne Riordan, an inquisitive, tough, sharp-witted writer who helps Marlowe during his investigation and later acts as Marlowe’s sounding board as he goes over the details of the case. The daughter of a former chief of police of Bay City, she has a strong sense of right and wrong, a beauty that will last, and she is, as Marlowe observes, a nice girl. With these qualities, Anne Riordan serves as a balance against the hard beauty and cynical brutality of Velma Valento.

Critical Context

In Farewell, My Lovely, his second novel with Philip Marlowe as the central character (the first was The Big Sleep, 1939), Chandler continued to elaborate on his idea of what the detective story should be. Along with other writers (most notably, Dashiell Hammett with his Continental Op and Sam Spade stories), Chandler was instrumental in moving the detective story away from a very formal and highly contrived exercise in logic and deduction to a more realistic, truthful format—removing it, in a sense, from the drawing room to the street.

Though mysteries in the classic style are still being written, the foremost practitioners of the modern detective story, such as Ross Macdonald and Robert Parker, are those who have adopted and adapted many of Chandler’s ideas and techniques. Their main characters are direct descendants of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

Chandler’s detective is a man of action (as opposed to the stereotypical ratiocinative detectives of the classic mystery stories), a man who moves in a world that reeks with the authentic flavor of life, a world in which people who commit crimes do not leave convenient clues lying about and whose motivations for committing these crimes are often tangled and uncertain. Marlowe possesses a heightened awareness of self, a realization that some of the motives that propel people to crime are the same ones that prompt him to seek out and make sense of the truth. Marlowe (and through him, Chandler) knows that people of all stripes, from whatever strata of society or profession, are capable of killing, corrupting, and being corrupted, and that in many instances, all of this is done in exchange for very little.

The difference between the classic mystery and the detective novel as pioneered by Chandler is perfectly summed up in a scene near the end of Farewell, My Lovely. Anne Riordan teases Marlowe by suggesting that he should have given a party, with the suspects and police in attendance, where he, at the head of the table, would then spin out the details of the case in a phony accent. Marlowe says, “It’s not that kind of story. It’s not lithe and clever. It’s just dark and full of blood.”

Bibliography

Babener, Liahna K. “Raymond Chandler’s City of Lies.” In Los Angeles in Fiction, edited by David Fine. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. The chapter on Chandler is a study of the image patterns in his novels. The volume as a whole is an interesting discussion of the importance of a sense of place, especially one as mythologically rich as Los Angeles. Includes notes.

Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Richard Layman. Hardboiled Mystery Writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002. A handy supplemental reference that includes interviews, letters, and previously published studies. Illustrated.

Hamilton, Cynthia S. “Raymond Chandler.” In Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: From High Noon to Midnight. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987. This study provides unusual insight into Chandler’s detective fiction from the historical and generic perspective of the American Western novel. Includes three chapters on the study of formula literature, a bibliography, and an index.

Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997. Supplements but does not supersede Frank MacShane’s biography. Hiney makes good use of memoirs, critical studies, and new archival material documenting Chandler’s life and career.

Jameson, F. R. “On Raymond Chandler.” In The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, edited by Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Starts with the observation that Chandler’s English upbringing in essence gave him an outsider’s view of American life and language. A useful discussion of the portrait of American society that emerges from Chandler’s works.

Knight, Stephen. “A Hard Cheerfulness: An Introduction to Raymond Chandler.” In American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, edited by Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. A discussion of the values and attitudes which define Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and which make him unusual in the genre of hard-boiled American crime fiction.

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.

Skinner, Robert E. The Hard-Boiled Explicator: A Guide to the Study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. An indispensable volume for the scholar interested in tracking down unpublished dissertations as well as mainstream criticism. Brief introductions of each author are followed by annotated bibliographies of books, articles, and reviews.