Raymond Chandler_Philip Marlowe 02

by My Lovely Farewell

  Randall stared at me with his mouth open and his eyes unconvinced.

  “Hell, she didn’t have to shoot a cop to do that,” he said.

  “I’m not saying she was a saint or even a halfway nice girl. Not ever. She wouldn’t kill herself until she was cornered. But what she did and the way she did it, kept her from coming back here for trial. Think that over. And who would that trial hurt most? Who would be least able to bear it? And win, lose or draw, who would pay the biggest price for the show? An old man who had loved not wisely, but too well.”

  Randall said sharply: “That’s just sentimental.”

  “Sure. It sounded like that when I said it. Probably all a mistake anyway. So long. Did my pink bug ever get back up here?“

  He didn’t know what I was talking about.

  I rode down to the street floor and went out on the steps of the City Hall. It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as Velma had gone.

  Raymond Chandler

  Raymond Chandler was born in 1888 and published his first story in 1933 in the pulp magazine Black Mask. By the time he published his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), featuring, as did all his major works, the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe, it was clear that he had not only mastered a genre but had set a standard to which others could only aspire. Chandler created a body of work that ranks with the best of twentieth-century literature. He died in 1959.

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  RAYMOND CHANDLER

  AVAILABLE AS VINTAGE eBOOKS

  The Big Sleep

  The High Window

  The Lady in the Lake

  The Little Sister

  The Simple Art of Murder

  Trouble Is My Business

  The Long Goodbye

  Playback

  Copyright © 1940 by Raymond Chandler

  Copyright renewed 1967 by Mrs. Helga Greene

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, in 1940, and, in paperback, by Vintage, in 1976.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chandler, Raymond, 1888–1959.

  Farewell, my lovely

  Reprint.

  Originally published: New York: Vintage Books, 1976, © 1968.

  I. Title.

  PS3505.H3224F3 1988 813’.52 91-50918

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-3016-3

  v3.0_r1