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Classic noir
Apr. 17th, 2014 08:16 pmMy classics book club decided to dip into one of the genre classics for its meeting last weekend, which I did not attend, because I hadn’t finished the book. This is dumb, because we read Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, which is less than 300 pages long.
It didn’t take me so long to finish Farewell, My Lovely because it was bad! Indeed, it was very good, despite the viewpoint character being an asshole. Farewell, My Lovely is told from the point of view of “hard-boiled” (i.e., casually sexist and racist, alcoholic, kind of an asshole but in a quietly grouchy way that makes you like him better than you should) private detective Philip Marlowe, a man who attracts getting concussions like honey attracts flies.
Oddly, Marlowe first gets enmeshed in plot not due to his actual occupation as a private investigator, but just from hanging around on the street somewhere, where he witnesses a gigantic dude named Malloy, on his first day out of prison after an eight-year stint for bank robbery, wander in a bar looking for his ex-girlfriend and promptly shoot the manager upon not finding her there. The police are cranky about Marlowe doing anything except be a witness, which he initially chafes at, but he is distracted in a timely fashion by being hired to be a bodyguard for a rich playboy named Lindsay Marriott, who is buying some jewels back from the thieves who took them in a stickup. Marlowe thinks something is weird but he doesn’t figure out what it is until he goes to the meeting and gets a concussion, and wakes up to find Marriott murdered.
From then on there is a lot of detective-ing and smoking of cigarettes and having people get mad at him, plus a few more concussions, and some dangerous attractive women, because of course. A lot of it is in really old-school gruff forties detective talk; most of the time I could figure out what they were talking about but about ten percent of it all I heard was “I heard you like noir, so I put some noir in your noir so you could noir while you noir” and then I had a mental image of Humphrey Bogart in a greatcoat and fedora.
You’re not giving me one more damn concussion until Lauren Bacall shows up, okey?
The book is written in first person POV, and the style is really interesting to me—mostly it trundles along in very stark and serviceable prose, sometimes almost police-report-y in its mundanity—“The man did thing X and then thing Y and then thing Z”—and then every now and again a darkly hilarious quip or beautifully apt metaphor suddenly pops up and socks you in the face. It’s a master class in understated, gruff sass.
For all the getting concussed and people dying, this isn’t really a very action-packed book. The middle is a bit, most notably featuring an exciting escape from being drugged and fraudulently imprisoned in a possibly-illegal private rehab clinic, but most of it is Marlowe and various cops and the aforementioned dangerous beautiful women standing around theorizing gruffly and drinking a lot, or questioning old ladies and drinking a lot, or philosophizing about bugs and drinking a lot.
With Marlowe trying to do two things in one novel—the first thing being to look for Malloy’s ex-girlfriend Velma while the cops look for Mallow, and the other is to figure out who killed Lindsay Marriott and why—it is somewhat inevitable that the two cases would wind up being connected, so I was not particularly shocked when this happened, but I admit to finding it quite satisfying and suspenseful figuring out how they were connected. It’s not at all obvious, but it doesn’t rely on hiding important stuff Marlowe knows from the reader until the reveal, either. So I feel it was a structurally sound mystery story.
I will admit that at no point did I get super excited about this book, even though I usually love noiry stuff with gangs and murders and mysteries and drinks, but this may have been a result of me having to read it in tiny drips and drabs of time around a massively increased work schedule and all the prep I needed to do before going to Paris tomorrow (eeeee!). It’s a sharp quiet dark little book about a sharp quiet dark little PI, and I’m glad I read it, although I wish I’d been able to give it the time I suspect it deserves.
It didn’t take me so long to finish Farewell, My Lovely because it was bad! Indeed, it was very good, despite the viewpoint character being an asshole. Farewell, My Lovely is told from the point of view of “hard-boiled” (i.e., casually sexist and racist, alcoholic, kind of an asshole but in a quietly grouchy way that makes you like him better than you should) private detective Philip Marlowe, a man who attracts getting concussions like honey attracts flies.
Oddly, Marlowe first gets enmeshed in plot not due to his actual occupation as a private investigator, but just from hanging around on the street somewhere, where he witnesses a gigantic dude named Malloy, on his first day out of prison after an eight-year stint for bank robbery, wander in a bar looking for his ex-girlfriend and promptly shoot the manager upon not finding her there. The police are cranky about Marlowe doing anything except be a witness, which he initially chafes at, but he is distracted in a timely fashion by being hired to be a bodyguard for a rich playboy named Lindsay Marriott, who is buying some jewels back from the thieves who took them in a stickup. Marlowe thinks something is weird but he doesn’t figure out what it is until he goes to the meeting and gets a concussion, and wakes up to find Marriott murdered.
From then on there is a lot of detective-ing and smoking of cigarettes and having people get mad at him, plus a few more concussions, and some dangerous attractive women, because of course. A lot of it is in really old-school gruff forties detective talk; most of the time I could figure out what they were talking about but about ten percent of it all I heard was “I heard you like noir, so I put some noir in your noir so you could noir while you noir” and then I had a mental image of Humphrey Bogart in a greatcoat and fedora.
You’re not giving me one more damn concussion until Lauren Bacall shows up, okey?
The book is written in first person POV, and the style is really interesting to me—mostly it trundles along in very stark and serviceable prose, sometimes almost police-report-y in its mundanity—“The man did thing X and then thing Y and then thing Z”—and then every now and again a darkly hilarious quip or beautifully apt metaphor suddenly pops up and socks you in the face. It’s a master class in understated, gruff sass.
For all the getting concussed and people dying, this isn’t really a very action-packed book. The middle is a bit, most notably featuring an exciting escape from being drugged and fraudulently imprisoned in a possibly-illegal private rehab clinic, but most of it is Marlowe and various cops and the aforementioned dangerous beautiful women standing around theorizing gruffly and drinking a lot, or questioning old ladies and drinking a lot, or philosophizing about bugs and drinking a lot.
With Marlowe trying to do two things in one novel—the first thing being to look for Malloy’s ex-girlfriend Velma while the cops look for Mallow, and the other is to figure out who killed Lindsay Marriott and why—it is somewhat inevitable that the two cases would wind up being connected, so I was not particularly shocked when this happened, but I admit to finding it quite satisfying and suspenseful figuring out how they were connected. It’s not at all obvious, but it doesn’t rely on hiding important stuff Marlowe knows from the reader until the reveal, either. So I feel it was a structurally sound mystery story.
I will admit that at no point did I get super excited about this book, even though I usually love noiry stuff with gangs and murders and mysteries and drinks, but this may have been a result of me having to read it in tiny drips and drabs of time around a massively increased work schedule and all the prep I needed to do before going to Paris tomorrow (eeeee!). It’s a sharp quiet dark little book about a sharp quiet dark little PI, and I’m glad I read it, although I wish I’d been able to give it the time I suspect it deserves.
