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Farewell, My Lovely

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Farewell, My Lovely

By: Raymond Chandler
Narrated by: Scott Brick
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

'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'

Cynical Los Angeles Private Investigator Philip Marlowe always falls for a sob story. Eight years ago Moose Malloy and cute little redhead Velma were getting married - until Malloy was framed for armed robbery. Now he's out and he wants Velma back. Marlowe meets Malloy one hot day in Hollywood and, out of the generosity of his jaded heart, agrees to help. Dragged from one smoky bar to another, Marlowe's search for Velma turns up plenty of gangsters with a nasty habit of shooting first and talking later. And soon what started as a search for a missing person becomes a matter of life and death . . .

Farewell, My Lovely is Raymond Chandler's second novel featuring laconic PI Philip Marlowe.

'Chandler grips the mind from the first sentence' Daily Telegraph

'One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain' Sunday Times

'Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes' Anthony Burgess

©1988 Raymond Chandler (P)2020 Penguin Audio Classics Modern Detectives Mystery Private Investigators Fiction Detective Heartfelt

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All stars
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This is a newly released recording so very few reviews but it's pretty much perfect. narrator has won awards.

highly recommended

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Masterly, how the story develops , and Marlow slowly embroils himself from a standing start. However, I found the plot and style “clunky”, so much so that I lost interest and gave up with five hours to go. As for Chandler’s famous epithets, as a stylistic device these became monotonous.

Heavy-going

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Picture this scene in your head. Two men meet for the first time and each treats the other with disdain and suspicion; each with good reason. Within the space of a couple of hours, the same two men sit drifting in a boat, holding hands as one of them trembles with face whitening terror at what he’s about to do, soliloquising eloquently about his fear of death and the doom he may be walking into. Their bonding is sincere and complete.
Now, picture the kind of prose that can make you (an educated and discerning reader) believe in these men 100%; seeing no flaw in that plot line or in the circumstances that put them there. With your heart pounding in rhythm with the protagonist’s, believing in every word and hooked along for the ride whatever happens, you suddenly reflect on just how superb this writing is!
That’s what you’re getting with this book. All the charm, witty zingers, weird characters and violence of the noir genre, but in the hands of the maestro, Raymond Chandler, there is also the intimacy, empathy, tenderness in surprising places, just as the cruelty and violence also jumps out from unexpected places.
There is a writerly depth to Chandler that makes his a unique voice in the noir genre. Nobody is just a heavy, a lush or a floozy in his novels. Each has more backstory, which reveals itself in the descriptions, the dialogue or in some other organic manner that is always so much more entertaining than boring exposition.
His empathy for the frail human condition and his trust in the reader to get what’s between the lines, are just some of the reasons why Chandler is one of the most misunderstood, underrated, greatest writers of the 20th century.
If you’re looking for it, you will get all of that from this beautifully read book.
Yet, if you have no patience for all the art appreciation stuff and just want a cracking, pacy noir thriller with sparkling wit, lots of action and those classic one-liner zingers being tossed around like confetti at a wedding, then you’ll get all of that too.

It’s So Much More Than Witty Noir

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Another timeless classic - Philip Marlowe once again brought to life expertly by the narrator. A great story that keeps you gripped right to the end.

Another fantastic listen

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It starts simple but then spirals into disparate threads, climbing in a tense crescendo as Marlowe pulls it together. Epic.

Classic Noire

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very well constructed, with a lot of unexpected turns. It gives a credible picture of life on the eve of WW2

That's suspense

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I really enjoyed this book. Intelligent writing with a plot that kept me interested to the end, and guessing until the end also. It's very much of it's time, but that time period has been immortalised in classic cinema by the likes of Bogart and Mitchum and if you enjoy those old black and white film noir movies you should enjoy the books, like this one, from which those movies came. I found myself visualising some scenes in my mind's eye as if watching one. In fact I'd say the books have stood the test of time even better than the films. Definitely recommended if you like this genre.

noir classic

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Chandler once again writes a brilliant plot that seems to want only to hurt his character but is instead delicately weaving a story that compels you to keep listening for more.

The reading is very much in keeping with the period and brings the characters to life beautifully.

A fantastic detective novel

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