Farewell, My Lovely

“He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.”

Here, Marlowe is describing the unique features of the Florian bartender, and again, this demonstrates Chandler’s acute attention to detail. Chandler’s mode of description here is interesting in that it actually provides little in the way of truly precise details, instead offering up a broader description and letting the reader fill in as needed. It’s almost as though Marlowe himself can only broadly imagine what the man has been through.

“Slow steps shuffled and the door opened and I was looking into dimness at a blowsy woman who was blowing her nose as she opened the door. Her face was gray and puffy. She had weedy hair of that vague color which is neither brown nor blond, that hasn’t enough life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be gray. Her body was thick in a shapeless outing flannel bathrobe many moons past color and design. It was just something around her body. Her toes were large and obvious in a pair of man’s slippers of scuffed brown leather.”

This is Marlowe’s description of Jessie Florian. While this again reveals his attention to detail, it also demonstrates Mrs. Florian’s physical state. As Marlowe later finds out, she’s an alcoholic who clearly doesn’t take care of herself. This description is far more vivid than the description of the bar owner.

“Mrs. Florian—Jessie to me—said her husband left her nothing but his old clothes and a bunch of stills of the gang who worked at his joint from time to time. I plied her with liquor and she is a girl who will take a drink if she has to knock you down to get the bottle.” 

Here, Marlowe is telling Nulty about his encounter with Mrs. Florian. Important to note is how alcohol is handled in this moment: Marlowe uses it to get her to talk, but it’s a morally ambiguous move since Florian is an alcoholic and Marlowe is feeding her addiction for his own gain. While Marlowe consistently uses liquor throughout the novel to get what he wants, this is one of the only times it could be said to hurt the other person involved. 

“They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.” 

While Marlowe is physically describing an image, this moment also reveals his own personality. Much of this description is both sarcastic and honest, but more important is the fact that he takes so much thought and time to describing a seemingly arbitrary image. This is one of Marlowe’s unique personality traits that makes him such a successful private investigator: even when he’s not actively on a case, he’s thoughtfully inspecting the world around him. While working on a case, this thoughtful awareness usually amounts to interlinking clues. 

“There was a cornflower in the lapel of his white coat and his pale blue eyes looked faded out by comparison. The violet scarf was loose enough to show that he wore no tie and that he had a thick, soft brown neck, like the neck of a strong woman. His features were a little on the heavy side, but handsome, he had an inch or more of height than I had, which made him six feet one. His blond hair was arranged, by art or nature, in three precise blond ledges which reminded me of steps, so that I didn’t like them. I wouldn’t have liked them anyway. Apart from all this he had the general appearance of a lad who would wear a white flannel suit with a violet scarf around his neck and a cornflower in his lapel.” 

Here, Marlowe’s propensity for astute yet sarcastic and honest description shines. He is physically detailing Lindsay Marriott and reveals his first impression of him through this description. It’s clear to see that Marlowe initially thinks of Marriott as a rich pretty boy, and that he would never associate with him beyond the confines of work. That is to say, Marlowe thinks of himself as very different than Marriott in many regards. 

“It’s the only really valuable kind. Other kinds are valuable to some extent for the material, but chiefly for the workmanship on them. Fei Tsui is valuable in itself. All known deposits were exhausted hundreds of years ago. A friend of mine owns a necklace of sixty beads of about six carats each, intricately carved. Worthy eighty or ninety thousand dollars. The Chinese government has a very slightly larger one valued at a hundred and twenty-five thousand.” 

Here, Marriott explains why the Fei Tsui necklace that was stolen is so important to get back. However, more important than the priceless nature of the necklace is the fact that Marriott is so devoted to his lady friend, from whom the necklace was stolen. The fact that Marriott is willing to handle the exchange of money with the criminals illustrates his devotion to his friend, whom is later revealed to be Mrs. Grayle.

“The house was very still. Far off there was a sound which might have been beating surf or cars zooming along a highway, or wind in pine trees. It was the sea, of course, breaking down far below. I sat there and listened to it and thought long, careful thoughts.” 

This is Marlowe describing the quietness of the house as he and Marriott waited for the phone call from the criminals. Most important is here is how he mentions his thoughts. While he doesn’t say exactly what he’s thinking, this moment reveals that Marlowe is an introspective character, despite that the reader isn’t privy to exactly what he is thinking. 

“He lay smeared to the ground, on his back, at the base of a bush, in that bag-of-clothes position that always means the same thing. His face was a face I had never seen before. His hair was dark with blood, the beautiful blond ledges were tangled with blood and some thick grayish ooze, like primeval slime.” 

This is the first time Marlowe sees Marriott’s dead body, and he’s taken off guard because he didn’t expect him to be dead, let alone so brutally beaten. For Marlowe, such a savage beating means that Marriott’s murder was personal, not just the result of a jewel heist gone wrong. It’s also important to note that when Marlowe sees Marriott’s dead body, he mentions the “usual” position that indicates death, revealing that the sight of death is a familiar image for him, in his line of work.

“And in the other inside pocket a second cigarette case I hadn’t seen before. It was made of embroidered silk, a dragon on each side, a frame of imitation tortoise-shell so thin it was hardly there at all. I tickled the catch open and looked in at three oversized Russian cigarettes under the band of elastic. I pinched one. They felt old and dry and loose. They had hollow mouthpieces.” 

This is the description of the marijuana cigarettes that were found inside a secret pocket in Marriott’s jacket. These cigarettes are important because Marlowe knows they weren’t Marriott’s, which begs the question: who do they belong to? This question spurs much of the drama in the novel as Marlowe follows the clues that come from investigating the cigarettes. 

“I glanced at the card. It had come out of his billfold together with a number of other cards I hadn’t bothered to examine back there in the hollow of Purissima Canyon. It was one of my cards all right. It looked rather dirty at that, for a man like Marriott. There was a round smear across one corner.” 

Before this moment, Marlowe had told Randall that Marriott randomly got his name out of a phone book. However, Marlowe’s card was found inside Marriott’s wallet, indicating that he deliberately chose Marlowe, and furthermore, someone had specifically given Marriott his card. This moment also reveals how Marlowe can be careless at times. Despite having searched Marriott’s body before the police arrived, he missed this vital part of the puzzle.

“If you’re holding anything back with the idea of working on this case yourself to make yourself a little publicity, I’d forget it, Marlowe. I don’t like all the points in your story and I’m going to give you the night to think it over. Tomorrow I’ll probably ask you for a sworn statement. In the meantime let me give you a tip. This is a murder and a police job and we wouldn’t want your help, even if it was good. All we want from you is facts. Get me?” 

Here, Randall warns Marlowe that he better not stick his nose into police business. This is a theme of the novel, the tension between the cops and Marlowe. Even though Marlowe and the cops are usually working against the same enemy, each side is skeptical of the other’s ability to do the job correctly. 

“She was about twenty-eight years old. She had a rather narrow forehead of more height than is considered elegant. Her nose was small and inquisitive, her upper lip a shade too long and her mouth a more than a shade too wide. Her eyes were gray-blue with flecks of gold in them. She had a nice smile. She looked as if she had slept well. It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out.” 

This is Marlowe’s description of Anne Riordan. While Marlowe admits that Anne is cute, it’s a much different description than he gives to Mrs. Grayle later. Anne he deems cute and sweet and innocent, while Mrs. Grayle he views as sexual, beautiful, and sultry. For much of the novel, it seems as if Marlowe is more attracted to Mrs. Grayle than Anne, which reveals his taste in women. 

“Mrs. Florian was in bed. She was lying flat on her back with a cotton comforter pulled up to her chin. One of the little fluffballs on the comforter was almost in her mouth. Her long yellow face was slack, half dead. Her dirty hair straggled on the pillow. Her eyes opened slowly and at me with no expression. The room had a sickening smell of sleep, liquor and dirty clothes. A sixty-nine cent alarm clock ticked on the peeling gray-white paint of the bureau. It ticked loud enough to shake the walls. Above it a mirror showed the distorted view of the woman’s face.” 

This is the last time Marlowe sees Mrs. Florian alive. Shortly after this moment, she is murdered by Moose Malloy. However, here it seems as if she is close to death already. While it doesn’t directly state this, it’s implied that she is sick from the effects of alcoholism, thereby providing a sort of visually-oriented foreshadowing.

“Her hair was of the gold of old paintings and had been fussed with just enough but not too much. She had a full set of curves which nobody had been able to improve on. The dress was rather plain except for a clasp of diamonds at the throat. Her hands were not small, but they had shape, and the nails were the usual jarring note—almost magenta. She was giving me one of her smiles. She looked as if she smiled easily, but her eyes had a still look, as if they thought slowly and carefully. And her mouth was sensual.” 

This is Marlowe’s description of Mrs. Grayle, which is very different from the way he describes Anne. Immediately, Marlowe notes Mrs. Grayle’s sexuality, while he seems to not consider Anne as a sexual being. This is important to note because Anne’s attraction to Marlowe is obvious to readers, but Marlowe seems to be oblivious to her longings for him. 

“The door opened and Mr. Grayle stepped quietly into the room. I was holding her and didn’t have a chance to let go. I lifted my face and looked at him. I felt as cold as Finnegan’s feet, the day they buried him.” 

Right before this moment, Mrs. Grayle had told Marlowe to kiss her, and so he did. She was sprawled across his lap when Mr. Grayle comes into the room and witnesses his wife’s affair. While Mrs. Grayle is insistent that her husband is aware of her infidelities, Marlowe feels bad about kissing her. The fact that he feels bad reveals something deeper about Marlowe’s character. While he is attracted to dangerous women and kissed Mrs. Grayle knowing all the while she was married, his guilt illustrates that he has limits to his morally-ambiguous behavior.

“His eyes were deep, far too deep. They were the depthless drugged eyes of the somnambulist. They were like a well I read about once. It was nine hundred years old, in an old castle. You could drop a stone into it and wait. You could listen and wait and then you would give up waiting and laugh and then just as you were ready to turn away a faint, minute splash would come back up to you from the bottom of that well, so tiny, so remote that you could hardly believe a well like that possible. His eyes were like that. And they were also eyes without expression, without soul, eyes that could watch lions tear a man to pieces and never change, that could watch a man impaled and screaming in the hot sun with his eyelids cut off.”

This is Marlowe’s description of Amthor’s eyes. Amthor is a supposed psychic, and this description heightens his mysterious and almost otherworldly nature. However, it’s also important to note how much time and energy Marlowe gives to describing Amthor’s eyes. No other character in the novel gets such a detailed description of one feature, which demonstrates just how taken Marlowe is by Amthor’s eyes. While it’s never discovered whether Amthor has true psychic abilities or is simply a conman, his eyes seem to unsettle Marlowe. 

“It was night. The world outside the windows was a black world. A glass porcelain bowl hung from the middle of the ceiling on three brass chains. There was light in it. It had little colored lumps around the edge, orange and blue alternately. I stared at them. I was tired of the smoke. As I stared they began to open up like little portholes and heads popped out. Tiny beads, but alive, heads like the heads of small dolls, but alive. There was a man in a yachting cap with a Johnny Walker nose and a fluffy blonde in a picture hat and a thin man with a crooked bow tie. He looked like a waiter in a beachtown flytrap.”

This describes what Marlowe sees while looking up at the ceiling in the hospital. He’s been drugged, and he’s hallucinating. Important to note is how Marlowe tries to make sense of the world around him while being drugged. Marlowe is a pragmatic character who pays close attention to detail, and even here, in this altered state, he’s attempting to piece together the details of his strange environment in order to get the full picture. 

“Cops don’t go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else. And the guy that sits back there in the nice big corner office, with the nice suit and the nice liquor breath he thinks chewing on them seeds makes smell like violets, only it don’t—he ain’t giving the orders either. You get me?” 

Here, Golbraith is explaining the landscape of police politics. Golbraith isn’t inherently a crooked cop, but he has been forced to do immoral things to keep his job. He’s trying to tell Marlowe that people higher than the police chiefs are making these calls, and the guys on the bottom just do what they’re told. In this way, what Golbraith did to Marlowe wasn’t personal, and he didn’t even want to do it; he was just doing what he was told, and not asking questions. 

“It got darker. I thought; and thought in my mind moved with a kind of sluggish stealthiness, as if it was being watched by bitter and sadistic eyes. I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them. I thought of nasty old women beaten to death against the posts of their dirty beds. I thought of a man with bright blond hair who was afraid and didn’t quite know what he was afraid of, who was sensitive enough to know that something was wrong, and too vain or too dull to guess what it was that was wrong. I thought of beautiful rich women who could be had. I thought of slim curious girls who lived alone and could be had too, in a different way.”

Here, Marlowe is about to attempt to board one of Brunette’s gambling ships, and he’s feeling existential because he’s scared that he might not make it off the boat alive. This is one of the rarer moments in the novel when Marlowe is openly vulnerable. 

“I’m scared stiff. […] I’m afraid of death and despair, […] of dark water and drowned men’s faces and skulls with empty eyesockets. I’m afraid of dying, of being nothing, of not finding a man named Brunette.” 

Here, Marlowe is revealing his feelings to Red before secretly boarding Brunette’s gambling ship. This is another rare moment where Marlowe is vulnerable and shows his true feelings.

“That brings us to Brunette. He don’t run the town. He couldn’t be bothered. He put up big money to elect a mayor so his water taxis wouldn’t be bothered. If there was anything in particular he wants, they would give it to him.” 

This quote comes from Red, who is telling Marlowe that Marlowe’s idea of the power hierarchy in the city is incorrect. While it’s true that Brunette’s money elected the mayor and he has major influence, he isn’t a puppet master, running things behind the scenes. This is important because Marlowe had assumed that Brunette might have had something to do with Marriott’s death or that he might be connected to Amthor in some way, but Red is doubtful of this theory.

“She leaned forward a little and her smile became just a little glassy. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.” 

Here, Marlowe describes the way Mrs. Grayle’s appearance shifts after she finds out that he knows her true identity. The truth makes her less appealing to Marlowe; now, she is tied to the murder plot, and has shown her hand, as it were.

“He was in love with her […] I mean Malloy. It didn’t matter to him that she hadn’t written to him in six years or ever gone to see him while he was in jail. It didn’t matter to him that she had turned him in for a reward. He just bought some fine clothes and started to look for her the first thing when he got out. So she pumped five bullets into him, by way of saying hello. He had killed two people himself, but he was in love with her. What a world.”

Here, Anne recounts what happened between Moose Malloy and his beloved Velma. Marlowe is astounded by the lack of practical judgment in Malloy’s actions toward Velma/Mrs. Grayle, as they go against the ardent pragmatism through which Marlowe views the world.