While working a missing persons case, Detective Philip Marlowe finds himself drawn into a murder investigation. When his employer is tucked in for the big sleep, Marlowe tries to piece the crime together, taking a few lumps in the process.

The characters, the settings, and the turn of phrase still work today—the similes especially, Marlowe’s cynical observations often bring a wry smile or an outright chuckle. There's also a lot of beautiful landscape prose which can get missed and his attention to detail (or maybe Marlowe's) is impressive. You could have the most exciting plot imaginable but if the writing isn't up to snuff, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, but sometimes an author can be so good that the plot is almost secondary.It is always good to follow these stories of the hard drinking detective and this is a fairly good story. This story of a thug getting out of prison and trying to find his girl is fairly straightforward, but Raymond Chandler throws a bucketload of red herrings into Farewell, My Lovely in an attempt to throw you, dear reader, off the trail. That a man occasionally smoked a stick of tea, a man who looked as if any touch of the exotic would appeal to him.

In 1942, The Falcon Takes Over, a 65-minute film that was the third in the Falcon series about Michael Arlen's gentleman sleuth Gay Lawrence (played by George Sanders), used the plot of Farewell, My Lovely. Like all his novels, it has a memorable beginning, this time with Philip Marlowe spotting a man outside a bar wearing a sports coat with golfballs on it for buttons and alligator shoes with 'white explosions on the toes'. Throughout the story, Chandler takes the reader in a multitude of directions and when Marlowe makes any sort of headway, a new element is introduced thus changing the case. Marlowe will have to travels through the unsavory, with corruption everywhere he goes, mostly in the nearby small town of Bay City, ( Santa Monica). You need to pay close attention to PI Marlowe’s hunches, or you will get lost in the tangled, bewildering plot.

Marlowe confronts her: she is Velma and had used Marriott to keep Mrs Florian in line after she recognised Velma's voice on Grayle's radio station. Here are two examples: "The moist air was cold as the ashes of a dead love" and "the voice became as cold as a canteen meal.