Standing up against all the crooks and corruption is Philip Marlowe. Deemed too cynical by both readers and critics of that era, his books took decades to find an audience, who read them as cautionary tales about the nature of corruption (moral, fiscal, legal, political and carnal) rather than escapist fictions. Whenever I’m reading the comments following online news stories, I see the same line repeating over and over again like the chorus of a Greek tragedy: “The system is broken.” That was the starting pistol and the finishing line for Raymond Chandler work back in the 1940s. And the wealthy playboy, soon to be murdered, runs a racket in stolen jewelry. The cuckold judge with the cheating trophy wife is impotent both personally and professionally. Many cops serve the double-dealing mayor and his elite cronies. In Chandler’s second Philip Marlowe PI novel, the mayor of Bay City is in the back pocket of a wealthy crook who runs gambling boats past the three-mile limit. For a book published 80 years ago, it’s surprisingly fresh and prescient. One good thing about the pandemic was catching up on classics like “Farewell, My Lovely” by Raymond Chandler.
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