Farewell, My Lovely
Page 25
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
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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
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