I decided the best way to crack this case was to follow the smartest man involved in it.
Curious things can happen when a novel is bought by a Hollywood studio, especially when all it wants to do is extract the plot and insert it into one of its existing series. This was the case in 1942 when RKO acquired the rights to Raymond Chandler's second novel Farewell, My Lovely and converted it into The Falcon Takes Over, the third outing for super-suave amateur detective Gay Lawrence (George Sanders). It was the first of Chandler's stories to reach the screen (although the world would have to wait until 1944's Murder, My Sweet for his signature character Philip Marlowe to do the same) and at least in the early going it's somewhat faithful to the novel, but the abbreviated running time (just over an hour) coupled with the need to shoehorn in some tired comic relief (mostly by Allen Jenkins as the Falcon's cowardly driver) doesn't leave director Irving Reis much time to linger over any plot points. He just ferries Sanders from place to place and from character to character until the sleuth has all the clues he needs to figure out who did what to whom and why.
Along the way Sanders picks up aspiring newspaper reporter Lynn Bari, who's looking for a scoop and hopes the story of escaped manslaughterer Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) will be her ticket to the big time, and has to dodge police inspector James Gleason, who would just as soon he stay out of police business. There's also a femme fatale of sorts in the form of Helen Gilbert, who has a Madeline Khan-like quality but only from certain angles, and an early, uncredited performance by Hans Conried as the effete Lindsey W. Marriot, who hires the Falcon under suspicious circumstances and proves to be a most untrustworthy client. After this entry, Sanders turned the Falcon series over to his brother Tom Conway (in the aptly titled The Falcon's Brother), who ran with it until 1946 but didn't have the benefit of any more Raymond Chandler stories. I'm sure that suited Chandler just fine.