Farewell, My Lovely

Detective Philip Marlowe is an even more complex and interesting character in Farewell, My Lovely, as he is hired by an ex-con to find his former girlfriend. The story takes place across a number of Los Angeles neighborhoods, and captures the racism, class divisions, and political corruption of a city in transition: “When I come here twenty-two years ago we didn’t lock our doors hardly. Now it’s gangsters and crooked police and politicians fightin’ each other with machine guns, so I’ve heard. Scandalous is what it is.” This is one of Chandler's best pure Los Angeles novels.