Bestselling crime novelists Megan Abbott and Ian Rankin are just some of the contemporary writers who sing Chandler’s praises. Chinatown, LA Confidential, The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice all owe a debt to Chandler’s Marlowe. Philip Marlowe novels have been turned into a number of classic noir films ( The Big Sleep, Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbye) and since then they have also inspired many other Hollywood movies. But let’s say you’re still curious, what, if anything, would you gain? Why is Chandler still considered by many writers, readers and critics to be one of the great noir writers of all time?

Chandler’s old-school tough guy detective is not for everyone. Part of what makes the noir genre great is its ability to be constantly reinvented and updated with endless variations and tweaks. You can choose any one of the countless more socially sensitive contemporary crime novels written today, featuring a range of characters of different ethnicities, sexual orientations, non-normative physical traits and so on. Chandler readers might want to immerse themselves in a world where men were men, dames were dames, and wisecracking and drinking a quart of whiskey before bedtime was standard operating procedure for a generation recovering from the trauma of World War I and the Great Depression, just as they faced another world war.īut what if you find casual racist slurs, sexist remarks and macho bravado off-putting? Would you still bother to read Chandler then? The simple answer is, you don’t have to.

Why would you choose to read Raymond Chandler’s classic LA noir novel, Farewell My Lovely, or any Chandler novel for that matter, when crime fiction fans today can choose from a bewildering range of contemporary noir? Chandler published Farewell My Lovely in 1940 and, by today’s standards, it has some pretty outdated and at times downright offensive attitudes about women and ethnic minorities – or at least its central detective-protagonist, Philip Marlowe, does.įor some readers Marlowe’s old-fashioned attitudes might be the very thing that attracts them, just as some fans of Golden Age crime fiction (Agatha Christie, PD James) are drawn nostalgically to the pre-war social values and class divisions in those novels.

Sylvia Miles as Mrs Florian and Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe in Farewell My Lovely 1975. “A yellow window hung here and there, all by itself, like the last orange.”

Farewell my lovely novel