And yet, he’s chosen a life of unstructured, underpaid, haphazard work, where he is given little notice to investigate suspicious, cagey strangers and find out their darkest secrets. There’s no need for him to do other people’s dirty work – he could be a white collar man with all the bourbon he desires. From the way he talks, you can tell he is intelligent and sharp-witted. There isn’t much in my trade.” Marlowe is well educated. In The Big Sleep, the book that precedes Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe describes himself: “I’m thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there’s any demand for it. And of course, that is what Raymond Chandler is doing: he is using Marlowe to explore a mythical, violent LA – and Chandler commits it to paper. In my mind, Marlowe is not only a detective, but a freelance writer for hire, someone who investigates stories for a living. Or rather, that I have started to wish I could be him. Since I’ve started writing for money, I have come to identify much more with Raymond Chandler’s enigmatic gumshoe, Phillip Marlowe. There’s a reason that Jason Schwartzman’s writer character in Bored To Death is reading Farewell, My Lovely when he decides to become a private detective. “It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed open and looked in.”
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