By Stuart Mitchner
This conflicted reading adventure began months ago with a passing reference to Raymond Chandler in Anthony Lane’s March 10, 2025 New Yorker article on Ross Macdonald’s Underground Man and the LA wildfires. Pointing out the distinctly different “moods of their investigations,” Lane says Chandler “haunts you and makes you laugh” while Macdonald “keeps you posted.” More “intent on criminal justice and on how easily it is rusted and bent,” Chandler was “more of a poet than a plotter.”
As I began reading Farewell, My Lovely in The Raymond Chandler Omnibus (Knopf 1975), I remembered being fascinated by the giant on the cover of my mother’s old Pocket Book paperback. I was around 15, having graduated from the school of Mickey Spillane. I may have begun reading simply to find out the full name of the place on the neon sign the big man was gazing at, since only the last few letters were visible. I’m not sure why I didn’t get past the the opening, which was at least more exciting than the first chapter of The Big Sleep, the other Philip Marlowe Mystery that turned up among mother’s tawdry little paperbacks, this one with a sexy, frightened-looking blonde on the cover. Maybe Chandler seemed too tame, too literary after the eyeball-gouging brutality of Spillane.
Wider Than a Beer Truck
First published in 1940, Farewell, My Lovely begins on “one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.” Like the giant on the Pocket Book, the big man is staring up at the second floor windows of a dive called Florian’s. How big is big? “Not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck.” Chandler is just getting started: “He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his at, but he didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
Such sheer joy to read, I had to read it over again out loud. How could my 15-year-old self have put the book down after a passage like that? Now that I think of it, I know why, this being around the time a jazz-loving friend and I had visited a Black church in Indianapolis, where we were warmly welcomed and invited to stand with all the men up front when the congregation sang a spiritual called “Somebody Touched Me.” The book I was reading on the bus from Bloomington was Mezz Messrow’s Really The Blues. I was a member in good standing of the Jazz Club. No wonder I felt conflicted by all the racist slang as the big man invades Florian’s, which he calls a “dinge joint” and a “shine box”; he’s looking for his Velma, who used to “warble” there when the place had a white owner and whites-only clientele.
Yet Chandler was such fun to read more than half a century later that I was laughing out loud even as the big man was throwing a “dinge” out on the street, hurling the Black bouncer across the room, and accidentally on purpose breaking the Black owner’s neck, thus the novel’s first murder, which nobody took seriously because it was “only a shine.” Not that Marlowe didn’t get roughed up himself. His first physical contact with the Moose is pure Chandler: “A hand I could have sat in came out of the dimness and took hold of my shoulder and squashed it to a pulp. Then the hand moved me through the doors and casually lifted me up a step. The large face looked at me. A deep soft voice said to me, quietly: ‘Smokes in here, huh?’ “ At first I thought he was talking about cigarettes.
It’s as if the sheer physical magnitude of Chandler’s creation tempts him to see human beings as objects. The most obvious example of this effect is the stress on the word it when Moose Malloy throws a young Negro into the street: “Something sailed across the sidewalk and landed in the gutter between two parked cars. It landed on its hands and knees and made a high keening noise like a cornered rat. It got up slowly, retrieved a hat and stepped back onto the sidewalk. It was a thin, narrow-shouldered brown youth in a lilac colored suit and a carnation. It had slick black hair. It kept its mouth open and whined for a moment. People stared at it vaguely. Then it settled its hat jauntily, sidled over to the wall and walked silently splay-footed off along the block.”
There are posts online about the racism in Farewell, My Lovely. One reader who enjoyed it more than The Big Sleep, admits that it’s “astonishingly racist,” while pointing out that the “derogatory epitaphs” are “spread generously throughout the book regarding African Americans, Italians, Native Americans.”
In the Movies
The Central Avenue opening didn’t make it into the first film version of the story, retitled Murder, My Sweet (1944), which begins with a flashback voiceover by a blindfolded Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) who’s being interrogated by LAPD detectives. Gone is any semblance of an African American presence on the street, not to mention the nasty racist overtones. Florian’s is back to being a white bar and the big man’s victims are white. The 1975 adaptation starring Robert Mitchum as Marlowe retains the Central Avenue opening before going wildly, entertainingly, off the rails.
One advantage the movies have is being able simply to forego or finesse the pages of conversational guesswork between various characters that even a master of the form like Chandler has to deal with. He’s at his best when he can stop making, unmaking, and remaking the puzzle of the plot to focus, for example. on the wall calendar in Marlowe’s office: “They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to an 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.”
Another way Chandler escapes the tedium of making sense of the array of possibilities he’s set in motion is to have a sinister doctor shoot Marlowe “full of hop,” making a thing of beauty of the bed in the smoky room he’s locked inside: “It was a lovely bed. It was made of rose-leaves. It was the most beautiful bed in the world. They had got it from Carole Lombard. It was too soft for her. It was worth the rest of my life to lie down in it for two minutes. Beautiful soft bed, beautiful sleep, beautiful eyes closing and lashes falling and the gentle sound of breathing and darkness and rest sunk in deep pillows.” As for time, “I had no watch. They don’t make that kind of time in watches anyway.”
Angel Food
Sixty years ago it was the Watts Riots. The nineties began with the Rodney King melee that left 50 dead. My first memory of LA is watching Joe Friday do his “Just the facts ma’am” thing on Dragnet. In real life, my first actual visit to the smog-blanketed city was in June 1959, the day the headlines screamed in big back letters about Superman George Reeves’s suicide. (It should be noted that Princeton’s Christopher Reeve played the role two decades later.)
To really appreciate Chandler’s “slice of angel food,” it helps to consult wikipedia, which describes cake with a texture “so light the angels could eat it and still fly without being weighted down. Among African Americans, the cake is often served at funeral receptions, with the idea that the deceased person is now living among the angels.”
And where else but on Central Avenue in the City of Angels?