By Raymond Chandler. Copyright 1998 (reprint), Vintage Books.

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Raymond Chandler, in his second full-length Philip Marlowe novel (Trouble is My Business, published before this, was a collection of short stories), may very well set two records. First, Philip Marlowe may drink more scotch in this story than all other hard-boiled detectives in all other crime fiction novels combined. Second, Chandler seems to have discovered a way to have almost every single line of Marlowe's dialogue, and well as every other line of his running narrative, be a smart-ass comment.

Farewell, My Lovely finds Chandler's iconic Los Angeles private eye, Philip Marlowe, working on a go-nowhere case that doesn't interest him in the least and doesn't even go that far to paying any bills. Marlowe happens to be walking out of one joint at precisely the same moment a giant of a man is walking into another, which catches Marlowe's attention since the giant is white and the establishment into which he's walking is for blacks. Marlowe can't help but let his curiosity get the better of him, and before too long he's caught up in a case that involves a murdered black club owner, a sumo-sized ex-con, a jewel heist that leads to murder, and the usual assortment of seedy characters, dandies, dangerous women, crooked cops, and con artists. Chandler delights in plots that twist and turn and become convoluted and disorienting, and Farewell, My Lovely is one of his most insane. It features rich gigolos, sleazy psychics, pungent smelling shamans, and dope peddling doctors, among other seedy characters

But no matter how outlandish the story becomes, no matter what bizarre avenue Chandler chooses to send Marlowe down, he keeps everything tethered to believability through the sheer force of his prose, which as with The Big Sleep, emerges as some of the best, most elegant, poetic, and evocative writing in the history of American writing. I said it before, and I'll say it again, Chandler can write circles around any other guy in the game, including heavies like Hemingway (who emerges as the butt of one of Marlowe's jokes in this story) and Faulkner, even though they enjoy positions as intellectually lauded literary giants while Chandler often remains confined to the genre fiction ghetto, which in a way is a perfect reflection on the life of his signature character.

The first-person narrative bristles with wit and world-weary smart-assness. Chandler chooses to handle Marlowe's narration as a series of self-deprecating jokes and wry observations, always with the underlying hint of a lonely, tired man who struggle son to make the world a better place despite the ugliness he sees every day. Marlowe is never as tough or as cold as he likes to think he is, and the wide streak of humanist compassion that runs beneath his crusty exterior is what makes him such a dynamic character. He certainly takes his lumps in this story, too. Aside from drinking heavier than usual -- and Marlowe always drinks a lot -- he gets sapped too many times to count, choked and thrown around by a giant Indian, beat up by crooked cops, and shot full of dope. Marlowe is definitely abused and rumpled as his raincoat in this book.

But the real strength of Farewell, My Lovely, which does have a plot that meanders perhaps a little too leisurely for some readers, is the power behind Chandler's description. When Marlowe pays a visit to a drunken widow who might be able to help him figure out a piece of the puzzle, the description of her sordid existence is so vivid, so strong, that you can literally feel a heavy, drunken crust forming in your sore eyes, can feel the film of greasy sweat on your face, smell the stagnant air thick with smoke and the fumes of cheap booze. When the chapter finally draws to a close and Marlowe comments on that fact that leaning against the woman's door frame made him want to take a shower, all you can think about is how much you need to take a shower, too. It's vile and unappealing, but good lord, what powerful writing. Farewell, My Lovely is a steady processions of such exercises in literary power. It's as close as you can get to riding shotgun with a melancholy private dick through the underbelly of southern California circa 1940 without actually traveling back in time to do it.

Marlowe is helped out along the way by a truly grotesque cast of supporting characters, almost all of whom are either deceitful, rotten, or at the best, pathetic in some fashion. His dame this time around is Ann Riorden, a red-headed Irish girl who claims to be a reporter and can't seem to keep her nose out of the jewel heist-murder any better than Marlowe can.

Farewell, My Lovely is also informed by a simmering racial tension that, despite being expressed in the terms of the day that wouldn't fly with contemporary audiences, shows that Chandler had his finger -- and his main character -- on the pulse of steadily growing dissatisfaction among the black population of America. When Marlowe accidentally bears witness to ex-con Moose Malloy murdering the black owner of a black club, he finds he's the only one with much interest in solving the case. It's only when the case expands, and he figures out that it's connected in some way to the theft of a priceless jade necklace and the murder of a rich white man who turns out to be a gigolo that the authorities take an interest in what Marlowe's doing. And Marlowe observes several times himself that if you kill a black man, no one seems to care, but if you kill a white man, it's all over the news. Chandler's handling of the racial aspects of the story isn't exactly delicate -- Marlowe doesn't do anything delicately -- but his relationship with the black characters who appear in the book is certainly friendlier and more progressive than most. For Marlowe, color doesn't much matter. He knows people of all colors are equally capable of being rotten.

I don't think Farewell, My Lovely is as accessible a story as The Big Sleep. It's not as quickly paced and, at least on the surface, not quite as engaging. But if you spend more time with Farewell, My Lovely, the genius behind it becomes blazingly evident. The narrative is as complex as the plot it attempts to relay, and there's a tremendous feeling of being, like Marlowe, caught up in a series of events that are just too out of control and too weird to ever fully grasp. And as melancholy as the story is, it's also very funny. The focus here is less on the plot and more on developing Marlowe's personality and his twisted sense of humor, which sometimes seems to be all that he has left to keep him from just killing himself. At the same time, we get glimpses into Marlowe that are far more nihilistic and morose than anything we got in The Big Sleep. He's the wounded soldier, smirking even though he's bleeding, dulling the pain with another class of scotch and moving forward even though the world around him is dying. Farewell, My Lovely wasn't as easy or as exciting to read as The Big Sleep, but it's definitely going to haunt me and have me pondering it for a longer time. What a completely stunning book.

Labels: Espionage