Meet Philip Marlowe: he's a maverick private investigator, who doesn't play by the book, but - dammit - he gets results. Actually, results - and the paychecks that come with them - have been a bit thin on the ground lately, so when he spots a suspicious-looking giant white guy entering a primarily black Los Angeles nightclub called Florian's, his finely-tuned detectival instincts tell him he should follow and take a look.
Sure enough the guy, who turns out to be called Moose Malloy, also turns out to be fresh out of prison and looking for his pre-prison girlfriend, Velma (no, not that one). When the club's owner explains that the club has changed ownership since Velma's day and he can't help, Moose expresses his disappointment by snapping his neck like a stick of celery. After the police express minimal interest in the resulting case (the murder of a black man not really being the sort of thing to get them off their fat cop asses) Marlowe decides to investigate Moose's motive by seeing if he can locate Velma.
In quick succession Marlowe finds Jessie Florian, the ex-wife of the nightclub's former owner, who claims that Velma is dead, and gets a seemingly unrelated call from a man called Lindsay Marriott, who wants Marlowe to act as a sort of bodyguard for a trip to a nearby canyon for a rendezvous - something to do with delivering a ransom payment for a stolen jade necklace. And not without good reason, it tuns out, for no sooner have they turned up at the rendezvous point than Marlowe is coshed unconscious, and - the cosh-wielder having presumably got their eye in properly by this point - Marriott is coshed to death.
Some further lines of enquiry are opened up by Mrs. Grayle, the owner of the ransomed jade necklace, and by Jules Amthor, a supposed psychic whose name Marlowe finds secreted in the filters of some of Marriott's marijuana cigarettes. Mrs. Grayle is something of a minx - bored rich wife, older husband probably not cutting the mustard in the bedroom department - and makes it known to Marlowe that she is Well Up For It. Marlowe's encounter with Amthor is somewhat stranger - on being questioned by Marlowe about supplying the drugs to Marriott he has Marlowe escorted off the premises by some corrupt cops and entrusted to the care of a Dr. Sonderborg, who keeps him in a drugged stupor for a few days before Marlowe is able to escape.
Using Mrs. Grayle's name as leverage, Marlowe manages to extract the information that Malloy may be hiding out in a boat moored just offshore outside of the city's jurisdiction and used for gambling activity. Malloy turns out not to be on board but Marlowe meets with the boat's owner, local bigwig Laird Brunette, who agree to make some enquiries within the LA underworld.
Marlowe arranges a date with Mrs. Grayle and when she turns up lands her with a surprise: he knows that she is Velma, and married her current elderly husband, the poor sap, under a false name. Moreover, he has her old boyfriend Moose, who she fingered to the cops for the crime that got him (falsely) put away, right here in the hotel bathroom and he'd really like a word. Mrs, Grayle is not having any of it, though, and shoots Malloy before making good her escape, only to be caught up with by the cops some time later and shooting herself rather than be taken in.
The main things to say about Farewell, My Lovely are that a) it's very entertaining b) substantial parts of the plot don't really make any sense and c) that doesn't really matter. What I'm thinking of for b) are things like the bizarre interlude with Jules Amthor and Dr. Sonderborg, which read as if parachuted in from a completely separate novel. Oddly, this isn't far from the truth, as Farewell, My Lovely was a reworking of a few originally separate short stories. The point of it, though, isn't the seamless interlocking of all the plot elements but the overall style, some elements of which seem hackneyed now - rumpled cynical wisecracking private eye, chaotic domestic arrangements, complex and generally disastrous personal life, unconventional methods - but which Chandler and some of his contemporaries such as James M Cain and Dashiell Hammett were early exponents of.
Needless to say this stuff was and is tremendously popular material for films, and Farewell, My Lovely has been filmed a few times, though oddly only once under its original title. Most of the other Marlowe novels, including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye have been filmed (often multiple times) as well.
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