Episode 88: Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

SPEAKERS
Sarah Harrison, Carolyn Daughters, Owen Hill

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

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Carolyn, it’s good to see you again. It’s good to see you.

Carolyn Daughters  01:45
I have missed you.

Sarah Harrison  01:47
I have been gone. Our listeners don’t know that, but I was in India for two weeks.

Carolyn Daughters  01:53
Yes, and while she was in India for two weeks, I tried to hold down the fort. But I can’t swear I actually did. So now the team’s held down. It’s down. Yeah, the roof’s not flying off, but we are glad to be both back in town at the same time. And for this episode, which is going to be pretty awesome, we’re going to do some more Raymond Chandler. Before that, I want to give a shout out to one of our listeners. It is Tom Farthing from Chicago, Illinois, and he’s the Public Relations Officer for the North American Guild of Change Ringers. He weighed in on Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. Oh, my goodness, we got so much response from Dorothy Sayers The Nine Tailors episodes.

Sarah Harrison  02:39
We should do like a little special with some ringers. It’s so cool.

Carolyn Daughters  02:43
I would love that. And I would also like to bring Tom on to talk about change ringing.

Sarah Harrison  02:48
Yeah, that would be really fun. Thanks so much for listening and weighing in, Tom. We can’t wait to send you a sticker. Yes, I am very excited to read our book summary today. As Carolyn mentioned, this is our second Raymond Chandler for the year, and we have a super special guest we’re about to introduce. The book today is Farewell My Lovely, published in 1940. Philip Marlowe is about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, fortune teller, a couple more murders and more corruption than your average graveyard. The New Yorker says Chandler wrote as if pain hurt and life matters. Literary Review says Chandler was one of the finest prose writers of the 20th century. Age does not wither Chandler’s prose. He wrote like an angel. Raymond Chandler was a British-American novelist and screenwriter, In 1932 at age 44 he decided to write detective fiction after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, he published seven novels during his lifetime. The year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. Raymond Chandler died on March 26, 1959, in Mahalo, California.

Carolyn Daughters  04:33
We’re excited to have Owen Hill as our guest today. Owen is the co-annotator and editor of the annotated edition of Raymond Chandler’s classic novel The Big Sleep, published in 2018 by Vintage Crime. The Washington Post called The Annotated Big Sleep fascinating and essential, and Time Magazine referred to it as a wonderful recent volume. Owen is also a novelist and poet. The Giveaway: The Clay Blackburn story is forthcoming in the spring from PM Press. It’s an omnibus of his crime fiction. It includes three novels and a short story. He has reviewed crime novels for The Los Angeles Times and the East Bay Express. In 2005, he was awarded the Howard Moss Residency at Yaddo. He is co-editor with Jerry Thompson of Berkeley Noir for Akashic Press. A Memoir, Hands on a Mirror, is also available from Bootstrap Press. Owen worked for many years in a secondhand bookstore in Berkeley, which sounds amazing, and he’s currently an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. Welcome, Owen!

Owen Hill  05:49
Thank you so much for having me.

Carolyn Daughters  05:51
We’re really, really excited. We had Anthony Rizzuto on last month, and he told us we had to have you on. And we were, like, done.

Owen Hill  06:01
Yeah, we’re working with Anthony. He’s an old friend, and we had a great time digging into this stuff big time and working with Random House on it. It was really fun. Also Pamela Jackson, a scholar of California history and literature. It was like playing in a band.

Carolyn Daughters  06:35
Which instrument were you?

Owen Hill  06:38
I think I was the base. Those guys are stars. I just tried to keep it going.

Carolyn Daughters  06:46
Cool. So, Farewell My Lovely. Would you help us understand a little bit about Raymond Chandler’s voice by reading some of chapter eight for us?

Owen Hill  06:59
He gave me a quick, darting frown, as perhaps something ought to be done about that. Then he stepped back and said coldly, ah, yes, quite so. Come in, Marlowe, my house. Boy is away for the evening. He opened the door wide with a fingertip, as though opening a door himself dirtied it a little. I went in past him and smelled the perfume. He closed the door. The entrance put us on to a low balcony with a metal railing that ran around three sides of a big studio living room. The fourth side contained a big fireplace and two doors. A fire was crackling in the fireplace. The balcony was lined with bookshelves, and there were pieces of glazed metallic looking bits of sculpture on pedestals. We went down the three steps to the main part of the living room. The carpet almost tickled my ankles. There was a concert piano closed down on one corner of it stood a tall silver vase on a strip of peach colored velvet and a single yellow rose in the vase. There was plenty of nice soft furniture, a great many floor cushions, some with golden tassels and some just naked.

Owen Hill  08:13
[Continuing to read Farewell My Lovely] It was a nice room, if you didn’t get rough. There was a wide damask covered dive in in a shadowy corner, like a casting couch. It was the kind of room where people sit with their feet in their laps and sit Absinthe through lumps of sugar and talk in high, affected voices, or sometimes just squeak. It was a room where anything could happen except work. Mr. Lindsey Marriott arranged himself on the curve of the grand piano, leaned over to sniff at the yellow rose, then opened a French enamel cigarette case and lit a long brown cigarette with a gold tip. I sat down on a pink chair and hoped I wouldn’t leave a mark on it. I lit a camel blue smoke through my nose and took it and looked at a piece of black, shiny metal on a stand. It showed a full smooth curve with a shallow fold in it and two proto protuberances on the curve. I stared at it. Mary Marriott saw me staring at it. An interesting bit, he said, negligently. I picked it up just the other day as the dials spirit of dawn. I thought it was I thought it was Clops, teens, two warts on a fanny, I said, Mr. Lindsey Marriott’s face looked as if he had swallowed a bee. He smoothed it out with an effort.

Owen Hill  09:50
[Continuing to read Farewell My Lovely] You have a somewhat peculiar sense of humor. He said, Not. Peculiar, I said, just uninhibited, yes. He said, very coldly, yes, of course. I have no doubt. Well what I wish to see, what I what I wish to see you about is, as a matter of fact, a very slight matter, indeed, hardly worth bringing you down here, for I am meeting a couple of men tonight and paying them some money. I thought, I might as well have someone with me. Do you carry a gun? At times? Yes, I said. I looked at the at the dimple in his broad, fleshy chin. You could have lost a marble in it. I shan’t want to you to carry that nothing of that sort at all. This is a purely business transaction. I hardly ever shoot anybody, I said, a matter of blackmail. He frowned. Certainly not. I’m not in the habit of giving people grounds for blackmail. It happens to the nicest people, I might say, particularly to the to the nicest people. He waved his cigarette. His aquamarine eyes had a faint, faintly thoughtful expression, but his lips smiled the kind of smile that goes with a soap noose.

Carolyn Daughters  11:15
I love that. Thank you so much. One reason I wanted to read from Chapter Eight is it tells us something about what is going to be a bunch of sort of disparate scenes. This is some sort of wealth or display of wealth here. It’s the kind of room where you don’t get rough. You get a sense of Philip Marlowe and his sense of humor and the way he is looking at the room and the way he’s looking at Lindsay Marriott. You also get a launching point of the main story. What he’s going to end up doing, that is going to start unraveling very quickly. And I think you get a really strong sense of Raymond Chandler’s writing style and the character of Philip Marlowe.

Owen Hill  12:12
Oh, I think that’s really true. It was a good paragraph to pick out. It also has Marlowe, who is obviously very, I’d say male, bumping up against a barely hidden gay character. And characters like this were stock in these Black Mask type mysteries. They were exotic. And of course, it’s homophobic in its way, but it gives the detective somebody to bounce off of.

Carolyn Daughters  12:45
To maybe look even more masculine in comparison.

Owen Hill  12:49
Right? And it was also a part of a 30s and early 40s thing where people would go to gay clubs the way maybe white people would go to a black club in Harlem. It was considered slumming, and it was called the pansy craze. It was a big deal. It was shut down during World War Two by vice cops, but it was a big deal in the mid to late 30s.

Sarah Harrison  13:20
I want to back up a second. We just did a Raymond Chandler book. We did his first book, The Big Sleep, and now we’re looking at Farewell My Lovely, the second book. So, Carolyn, what you so you initially put this on our radar, yeah, as one of our greats, yes. What made you choose Farewell My Lovely as something to include on our book list?

Carolyn Daughters  13:49
We’re focused on the history of mystery. A lot of people also include Farewell My Lovely in their top lists for noir, for mystery fiction, and for literature generally. And there are some passages in Farewell My Lovely that are just so beautiful. They stop me in my tracks when I’m reading. The problem with Farewell My Lovely and what almost caused me to pull this book, was the racism in this book. It’s so blatant and so uncomfortable and problematic that I was stopped in my tracks in a completely different way. I was really grappling with this. And there’s all the themes that we see in Chandler’s works that we see also in The Big Sleep. The character, our narrator, the author. There are all of these different layers of writing or communication. The writing is homophobic, racist, it’s all of the -ists, he’s all the things. He’s all of them. But in this book, it’s kicked off, I think, literally, on page one, and so that stopped me, and by the time I was through chapter one, I was on the verge of talking to you about it, Sarah.

Sarah Harrison  15:33
We did have a conversation.

Carolyn Daughters  15:36
Okay, yes, so let me just pause there, because I feel like Owen might be able to help me unpack what it is I’m trying to say and the complexity of this book. It feels like Farewell My Lovely is stunningly beautiful and highly valuable and crazy problematic, all wrapped up in one.

Owen Hill  16:00

Absolutely true. I mean, it’s other than The Long Goodbye, I think it’s the most beautifully written of his books. But at the same time, and we know from letters that Raymond Chandler wasn’t especially enlightened, so we can’t say that he was doing it to show us what was going on. But it does show us what’s going on. It does. It’s kind of a tour of something that happened in the 30s and 40s. These clubs were the only place where African-Americans could not be intimidated. And on that level, it’s really interesting, Marlowe shows himself to be as racist as many white people were at that time. And if someone wanted to not read on, especially a person of color, I’d say, yeah, I totally understand. On the other side of it, though, it does show us the milieu, and rubs our noses in it. And that can be educational, you know. If you’ve read Chester Himes, he has a couple of scenes, I think in Rage in Harlem, where he’s obviously read this, and he has a scene just like it, where the African Americans in the bar kill a white guy. So he kind of fights back with it, with an almost as probably as well-written scene. This is a question that we all have when we’re reading books and looking at art of another time that was, I’d like to say, less enlightened. But in current times, we’re not very enlightened either. But that’s not meant to be an excuse. I don’t know.

Carolyn Daughters  18:03
Sarah, I’d be interested in hearing what you have to say too. We are spared this sort of racism and some of the cozy British novels, not because the characters are enlightened, but because no people of color, for example, appear in them.

Sarah Harrison  18:18
Yeah, that is actually my thoughts. I’m no expert, as we’ve mentioned many times, as we go through these books, we are just doing this high-level survey. So I can never speak from the angle of someone that’s read Raymond Chandler’s letters or someone who could write an annotated edition of any kind. At the same time, I didn’t feel like he was quite on the same level. Philip Marlowe was not a Nulty, right? So is he a shining knight above his times? No. But at the same time, he was the only one working on the case, and that without pay. I have trouble thinking that. I guess I felt like, like, Yeah, we don’t get that from Agatha Christie. She just leaves black people out of her books entirely. So to bring black people into the book, I guess I didn’t feel like he was echoing Nulty’s feelings, “yeah, this was just a meaningless killing of a different race.” He was sort of cynical. I didn’t realize he was saying that, but I felt like he was cynically reflecting on how it’s being treated. Because he was, in fact, investigating the case.

Carolyn Daughters  19:41
Twice when somebody asks if someone was killed in Farewell My Lovely, Philip Marlowe basically says, No, it was just a black man. I mean, he uses a different word.

Sarah Harrison  19:52
And let me ask you, I had never encountered the term “shine.” They used the word shine. I’ve never heard that before in my life.

Owen Hill  20:04
Yeah, it fell out of usage. But if you read things from the 20s, I think, and it does come up.

Sarah Harrison  20:14
Was it a derogatory term at the time as well?

Owen Hill  20:18
Yeah, I think so, yeah. I think the term that was used that it was that is now a derogatory term, was colored, you know, but they don’t use that.

Sarah Harrison  20:30
They use worse terms. Well, “colored” didn’t used to be a derogatory term.

Owen Hill  20:34
Not at that time. That was the preferred term, and it’s not used much in Farewell My Lovely.

Carolyn Daughters  20:48
I guess I don’t know. There’s this hopeful part of myself that feels that a writer, an introspective writer, of the talent of Raymond Chandler would have been more enlightened than he was. And then there’s this sense of disappointment. There’s really nothing to even do with those feelings, because there’s no real way to apply them, and there’s no solution. I probably just need to get over it. But I feel like, oh, he was oblivious at best. And he includes scenes in this book that I would argue don’t even need to be in Farewell My Lovely. You don’t have to touch on some of these issues, not every scene, not every piece of dialogue, was even critical to the book. And if they had been taken out, I don’t think the book would have been lesser for it. So I don’t know. I guess I wish he had been a more enlightened man.

Sarah Harrison  21:54
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect him to write like you would even like 100 years or 50 years or 20 years further on. I feel like any sort of early attempts to incorporate multiple races are evaluated harshly by the future. A couple things came to my mind, and I don’t know how you guys feel like we didn’t do a pretalk or anything totally raw, but one thing that came to my mind was Huck Finn. Huck Finn is helping Jim escape, but he doesn’t escape the language of the times.

Carolyn Daughters  22:36
Or that characterization of Jim.

Sarah Harrison  22:39
At the same time, language, Huck is risking his life in the things that he does. He’s, in this sense, within his time, and in a sense beyond his time. Yeah, that’s kind of I felt like Philip Marlowe was a little Huck Finn-ish.

Carolyn Daughters  22:57
But I also know people of color who won’t read Huck Finn and who probably would have only gotten halfway through chapter one of this book. I’m trying to also look at it from a variety of perspectives, because I have whatever privilege comes with whiteness, where I can read this book from beginning to end, and I can feel disappointed and frustrated and at times shocked and yet I could see somebody just shutting Farewell My Lovely, you know?

Sarah Harrison  23:32
Yeah, I think, I think almost any book can suffer from that, unless you leave it out, which I don’t want to. That’s kind of a modern critique we’re having right now in the world. Right when things are racist, you take Uncle Ben off the rice box, and so you have half of the people say, Take Uncle Ben off that’s racist, and half of the people saying, well, now you’ve erased black people off the rice box, and so don’t include them, then is that better?

Owen Hill  24:02
It’s true. And the way Raymond Chandler was working in Black Mask and in the third, 30s, 40s, 50s, several of my favorite writers come. They’re racist, sexist or homophobic. I mean, Chester Himes, who I love, was. There’s so much sexist stuff in there. And where do you go? Do you allow two generations of writers to be thrown away when they did beautiful work, and sometimes they did things that were politically right, you know, but failed miserably when it came to these other things.

Carolyn Daughters  24:45
Yeah, I mean, it’s a complex subject, and I don’t know that we have any right answers here, but I think it’s worth the discussion. It would be hard to talk about this book, I think, without talking about race. It’s the elephant in the room. From chapter one on.

Sarah Harrison  25:01
Owen, and let me ask you the same question in a different way. So you guys annotated The Big Sleep. Are you planning an annotation of Farewell My Lovely, or what it ranks in the canon? What makes this book something we should hold on to, or do you think we should let it go?

Owen Hill  25:23
It absolutely belongs in the canon because it’s so beautifully written. And Chandler honed his style for this second novel. And I think it stands up beautifully. As far as annotating it. Anthony Rizzuto and I had that talk, and it was like, How much money would you take to do this again? They’re not going to offer us enough.

Carolyn Daughters  25:50
Yeah, five years of your lives, right?

Owen Hill  25:52
Yeah, it was, and it was beautiful. I mean, I saw manuscripts at Oxford. I didn’t see this manuscript, and we spent a lot of time at UCLA’s rare book library, and we just learned so much. If I was 30 years younger, I’d do it again.

Carolyn Daughters  26:15
A worthwhile endeavor, but it seems like it was a lot of a lot of time of yours and Anthony Rizzuto’s and Pamela Jackson’s as well.

Owen Hill  26:24
Yeah, definitely. I do think somebody should do Farewell My Lovely for the beautiful, stylistic writing and The Long Goodbye, because I think it’s the great American novel.

Carolyn Daughters  26:36
We will be reading that one eventually. Our podcast is focused on the history of mystery. We’re going through time, so we’re in 1940 now, but we are very slowly making our way where we’re able to dip in and out of a bunch of really important books.

Sarah Harrison  26:59
And you mentioned that Raymond Chandler honed his style in this book. And I did notice, although I couldn’t seem to articulate it, that there’s some style shift between The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely. Philip Marlowe almost has a slightly altered sense of dialogue to my reading. Is it something that you can speak to? What about the style changed or became more refined between these first two books?

Owen Hill  27:27
He uses some of the same quirks. I mean, the similes just get better and those characters have a little more depth. I think partly in The Big Sleep, he was talking basically about terrible rich people. And if you compare Carmen to Velma, Carmen is just a rich person with absolutely no morals. You can’t really like Carmen. But Velma, you’re more likely to understand how she had to claw herself to the top and the final scenes, if you compare those final scenes. That final scene in The Big Sleep is just such a great setup scene, whereas the final scene in Farewell My Lovely is absolutely tragic and beautiful. Kind of Shakespearean. Velma’s death of shooting herself in the heart. It’s like you almost feel it yourself.

Sarah Harrison  28:41
I didn’t understand that, actually, until  Marlowe gave his explanation. And then I was like, oh, it was touching to think about her trying to do a good thing in that.

Carolyn Daughters  28:55
Yeah, and Anne Riordan. She’s a journalist and a worthy match for Philip Marlowe in this book. And this brings me to the characteristic of Philip Marlowe we see in The Big Sleep and in Farewell My Lovely but I called him, I said he had a self-destructive streak where there’s something about him that he longs for in The Big Sleep, silver wig, the woman he nicknamed Silver Wig. And in this book, he can see the promise there and the potential and the sort of life he might lead. But he doesn’t pursue it or take it so seriously that he actually contemplates it longer than a hot second. Like, there’s something going down in a bar. So hey, obviously the smart thing to do is to keep walking. But he goes in. He’s constantly working against his best interests. He’s not always doing what’s best for himself, and I just find that really interesting about this character.

Sarah Harrison  30:16
Yeah, tell us about his love interest, Owen. I want to know more.

Owen Hill  30:21
I mean, the Anne Riordan character in Farewell My Lovely is such, such a great character. I’m sorry he didn’t use her in later novels. It’s that kind of character like you get in 30s movies, it’s a Katharine Hepburn kind of character. Or Hildy and His Girl Friday. They’re tough, and you want him to fall in love with her, but his life’s too tragic, and he knows it, and he just can’t quite go there, which is very, very sad. I mean, in the later novels, he goes for so Linda Loring, who’s a little bit like that. I want to see somebody do fan fiction where they write an Anne Riordan novel, because she’s smart and tough and modern, which is great.

Sarah Harrison  31:19
You should do that, Owen.

Owen Hill  31:22
I’ll work on that. Yeah, although maybe a woman would do a better job with it. I don’t know.

Sarah Harrison  31:31
I don’t know somebody that can get into this voice, I think, is the person. It’s not a voice I don’t feel like everyone could take on successfully Raymond Chandler’s noir voice. He’s known for his lovely prose. And who can take that mantle on success?

Carolyn Daughters  31:56
Jane Austen, where some, maybe there are other authors, too, where contemporary authors have picked up the mantle, and they’re continuing to write books as if they were from that author.

Sarah Harrison  32:10
Probably. I know what happens for a sci-fi a lot. Oh my goodness. Like every sci-fi series has people taking it up and carrying it on. They can’t let the series go or die.

Carolyn Daughters  32:24
Do they need permission from either the original author or their estate? Or how does that work?

Sarah Harrison  32:31
That’s the question. I don’t know.

Owen Hill  32:33
There is a Chandler I think did one called Black Eyed Blonde. I didn’t like it too much, but how do you do it? And I know somebody who got permission from the Mario Puzo estate to write, like, five Godfather knockoffs. So it does happen.

Sarah Harrison  32:58
I think if you’re making money, you need permission, but if you’re just doing fan fiction to post.

Carolyn Daughters  33:01
That’s probably my issue. Yeah, okay. Well, you know, fan fiction, or not,  it would be a fun project for somebody to pick up the Anne Riordan character from Farewell My Lovely. And also authors do this too, where they’ll see a character in a book and grab that character and then make their own fresh and new book based on that character.

Sarah Harrison  33:26
They do it now. Did they do it back then in the genres we mentioned? He didn’t use Anne Riordan again. None of these characters were in the previous book. Does he reuse characters in his future books, Owen?

Owen Hill  33:39
A little. This guy, Bernie Olds, who’s a good detective or good cop, I think he works at the D.A.s office, as Marlowe supposedly did, I guess. But not much. And this Linda Loring after, I think, in the latest but when he didn’t finish, Linda Loring comes in as his wife.

Carolyn Daughters  34:07
With regard to this self-destructive streak, he has his $500 check at one point in Farewell My Lovely, and he says, “The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess. That being the obviously smart thing to do, I called Eddie Mars and told him I was coming. That’s how smart I was.” He has that kind of line a couple times in Farewell My Lovely. He’s got it in The Big Sleep. What is it about this character where the smartest thing to do is take path A, but he’s going to take path B. What is it with this guy?

Owen Hill  34:43
I think it’s an intense, almost psychotic curiosity, and this is the thing that drives so many detective novels now. Like, no, they shouldn’t take the case. It’s good. It’s just going to be trouble, and they’re not going to get any money. And I think it may have started with Dashiell Hammett, but it’s a Dashiell Hammett-Raymond Chandler thing where they’re so curious and they have to finish. They have to know what’s going on, and it becomes a kind of self-destructive force, but otherwise you don’t get a plot because they quit. I’m going home.

Carolyn Daughters  35:20
I got the check in hand. Novel done.

Sarah Harrison  35:22
Yeah. I mean, he’s so deprecating in that way, like I’m gonna do something stupid. And also, you know, he gets beat up a lot.

Carolyn Daughters  35:33
He gets beat up a lot in this book.

Sarah Harrison  35:35
But he does always win. He does solve the case. So I can’t exactly tell if it’s just a sensational curiosity pushing him on, or if there is real method back there or a little above?

Owen Hill  35:54
I don’t know. That’s a good question. I mean, I do think of it as just as a thing where of not being able to let go at all.

Sarah Harrison  36:07
I feel like today somebody would write a prequel right to answer these questions. What did happen to Philip Marlowe that made him have such an attachment disorder?

Carolyn Daughters  36:16
I agree with this, because you use the word “tragic.” Well, his life is so tragic, he’s not gonna picture himself being with a person like Anne Riordan in Farewell My Lovely, who, for all intents and purposes, has her shit together. What is so tragic about his life?

Owen Hill  36:36
Well, he seems to push himself into tragic situations, which is tragic, and he has this high moral standard, which is why we love him. But it’s the sort of the thing that puts him into tragic situations and makes him appreciate and see it, which is why he’s able to articulate it so well. We don’t know much about his background. What do we know? He’s from Santa Rosa. He went to college a bit, and he’s tall. That’s kind of it, you know?

Carolyn Daughters  37:14
Yeah, he was fired from the police force for insubordination. He tests high insubordination.

Owen Hill  37:24
And that’s also why we love him. It’s an anti-hero.

Carolyn Daughters  37:29
Yeah, anti-hero. And The New York Times Book Review says Raymond Chandler “seems to have created the culminating American hero. Wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious.” He’s the whole picture.

Sarah Harrison  37:45
All true. He’s kind of an anti-hero. But if you leave a police force that’s continually represented as corrupt, it is a little heroic. Like, how do you find your path if you want to solve the crime, and it’s corruption down every path. How do you find your path? This feels like the way he’s trying to walk forward in getting to the bottom of things.

Owen Hill  38:16
Yeah, and we don’t know how he came by that high moral standard, but we all want to be like that.

Sarah Harrison  38:23
So is it Philip Marlowe that draws you, or is it Raymond Chandler’s writing what draws you about the body of work?

Owen Hill  38:32
I’m a fan of all kinds of detective fiction, so that’s part of it. But mostly, I read a lot of poetry, and I love poetry, and almost every other paragraph is a poem. You know, you could pull it out. And when I was reading it aloud, I thought, God, that’s good writing. And I’ve read this book four times.

Carolyn Daughters  38:52
I feel that way too. There are certain parts of Farewell My Lovely that I just I read and then reread, and then paused and thought, I mean, just really some incredible prose. Sarah, what were your thoughts about this book in comparison to The Big Sleep. Were you feeling this makes a good choice for Tea Tonic and Toxin? Or were you asking why are we reading this book? How did you feel about it?

Sarah Harrison  39:19
A little of both. I know we read multiples of certain authors for different reasons. We read The ABC Murders. We’ve read several Agatha Christie’s, right? This is Agatha Christie’s first. This is Agatha Christie’s unreliable narrator. This is the first serial killer novel. They all had a thing. As I was reading through this, I was wondering, what is its thing? It’s not the first book, it’s the second. I could never put my finger on what the thing is, other than it’s a really good book, and it’s a classic.

Carolyn Daughters  39:45
I felt like Farewell My Lovely was more beautifully written than The Big Sleep.

Sarah Harrison  40:03
I couldn’t decide. I felt like it was more concisely written, like it was more on target. I felt like he had a handle on his style, but it was also a little bit more quippy, a little bit more jokey. And I couldn’t figure out if I liked that or if I wasn’t liking that as much.

Carolyn Daughters  40:24
Owen, what are your thoughts?

Owen Hill  40:25
I like the balance there. There are a couple notes that come after that. I don’t that I like, but aren’t as good. High window and little sister, where he’s kind of paradise, a parody of himself, which is only fun, whereas this, it had a nice balance of seriousness and it was quippy. Some of the best quips are in there. I think he got a little more confident after the first novel. Both these novels, and all of his novels, are taken from his short stories. He cannibalized. I think with this one, he may have just taken things a little higher. Nothing against The Big Sleep. How can anyone have a first novel like that? But Farewell My Lovely is maybe a little more confidently written. Maybe that’s what it was, a sense of confidence.

Carolyn Daughters  41:28
There’s this scene I want to get both of your takes on. When Philip Marlowe is talking to Detective Lieutenant Carl Randall, who’s this honorable cop from Homicide Division in LA. They’re in this room talking 18 floors above the ground. This bug climbs all the way up there, he says, to make a friend. And so he folds the bug carefully into the soft part of his handkerchief, puts the handkerchief in his pocket, rides the elevator down, and then walks out the front porch of City Hall to some flower beds. He puts the bug carefully in the bush. And then I wondered in the taxi going home, how long it would take him to make the homicide bureau again. And when I read this, I thought he sees himself in the bug. What do you guys think?

Owen Hill  42:39
I think it’s a great metaphor and kind of extraordinary for a detective novel like, whoa, suddenly he’s doing this poetic thing with a bug. It’s like, and maybe that’s more confidence, because would you really put that in if you were writing your first novel? I mean, Chandler wrote poetry too, and it’s kind of a poetic metaphor.

Sarah Harrison  43:06
He brings the bug up a couple of times. I was like, he’s got some feelings about the bug. You know, he made it up there. Philip Marlowe takes him back down. It’s just saving and protecting him. You know, he like, brings the bug up to Randall later. Well, you know, he’s just making a joke to himself, yeah, Randall has no idea what he’s talking about. His love of joking to himself, only I did find kind of endearing. I was making cracks that nobody gets at all.

Carolyn Daughters  43:54
Right? It’s not like he has an audience. There are like people all chuckling. I hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s interesting. So either Philip Marlowe sees himself as the bug in Farewell My Lovely or he’s saving the human equivalent of the bug. He’s the guy who raises his hand and says, I’m gonna figure this out. I’m gonna fight this.

Sarah Harrison  44:18
He’s saving the bug by taking him out. You know, he himself quit. The bug climbed high, and he took him back out. Is the bug gonna climb up again? What’s going on? What’s the storyline with the bug?

Carolyn Daughters  44:31
He’s on the 18th floor in City Hall, still fighting the good fight. It seems like the bug doesn’t belong in City Hall, but he’s going to keep going up there, making his way. I thought there were certain elements like that that were really charming. And then Raymond Chandler gets really introspective at times in this book. Philip Marlowe gets very introspective as a character when he’s on a boat, and his thoughts start progressing, and he thinks about his life, or about what he’s attempting to do, or the people he’s trying to help, and you start following snippets of how his brain is working. Which I really liked. It was maybe deeper or a little bit further than The Big Sleep.

Sarah Harrison  45:32
Owen, do you have a favorite metaphor? I think Raymond Chandler was known for creating these different sorts of visual metaphors.

Owen Hill  45:41
I had written some down, and it was the one about a tarantula. He stuck out like a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake. That’s what he said of Moose Malloy in Farewell My Lovely. That’s my favorite. And then the very famous one, a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole through a stained glass window. I mean, those are brilliant. And I think he hit his height at this book of when it came to the similes, because after that, he knows they’re fun, and he knows he’s getting attention. So he throws them into his other books like crazy. But I think with this one, he’s really spot on. You really see Moose when he describes him as a tarantula on a piece of cake.

Sarah Harrison  46:38
That’s a good one.

Carolyn Daughters  46:41
He feels almost like a big block of wood,. He just feels like, if he were a cartoon, he’d be three feet tall and just as wide.

Sarah Harrison  46:53
Exactly like that Warner Brothers character, like the Abominable Snowman, always accidentally smashing everything. That’s Moose Malloy did. Like, I can’t get a good handle on him as an actual, real person.

Owen Hill  47:11
Raymond Chandler liked descriptions of big men. I mean, it’s all through the short stories. There’s a Moose character in a short story called Try the Girl, where the beginning is almost exactly what he says about Moose in the novel. He just kind of steals from himself. He likes those big blocks of men. I believe there’s one in The Big Sleep, too. One of the gunmen.

Sarah Harrison  47:48
Not as much a main character as Moose, but yeah, that’s interesting. We mentioned he is self-destructive, but Carolyn, you have a whole section here about how he’s also a catalyst in Farewell My Lovely. But you know what? We shouldn’t talk about it right now.

Carolyn Daughters  48:03
We know what we should do. We should talk about it in another episode.

Sarah Harrison  48:31
I’m not a Raymond Chandler by any stretch. Oh, we don’t know. I bumbled my way through a conversation with no good similes or metaphors.

Carolyn Daughters  48:40
That’s why we have guests. So you and I can both fumble. Owen, we would love to have you join us for another episode.

Owen Hill  48:47
If you’re willing. I certainly am. I’m having a good time.

Carolyn Daughters  48:51
Awesome.

Sarah Harrison 
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Carolyn Daughters
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Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.