Customer Reviews

The Long Goodbye

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The Long Goodbye is a novel with lots of meat on its bones. The plot is engaging and complex, the characters are all extremely colorful, the dialogue is superb and the descriptive passages are in a league of their own. Chandler also provides us with an abundance of social commentary while exploring a number of important themes.
One of these themes is the nature of friendship. At the start of the book, Philip Marlowe, a well established literary character notorious for being a cynical loner, finds a friend. The friend's name is Terry Lennox and he's what could be described as a lovable lush. When Terry confesses to committing a brutal crime, Marlowe is unable to believe his friend could ever be capable of such a thing and, against all odds, looks to vindicate him.
Along the way, Marlowe meets Eileen and Roger Wade, an unhappily married couple who belong to roughly the same privileged social circle as Terry. A fabulously successful writer of romance novels, Roger is also a tormented alcoholic. A good deal of the book is concerned with examining the Wades' dysfunctional marriage.
This is a wonderful book, full of insight and bursting with humanity. It is a marvelous showcase for Raymond Chandler at the height of his literary powers. Highly recommended.

"The Long Goodbye" is unlike most of Chandler's other novels. It's longer. It's loaded with more description, internal life, and character investigation. Its plot -- though seeming more random -- is actually tighter and more pointed than his earlier work. In some ways it's more ambituous and revealing than his other work. In other ways, it contradicts his earlier writing style. But no matter how you look at it...it's awesome.

There are a couple of things I've always admired in Chandler.

First, he conveys everything in scene. After an obligatory physical description, everybody is characterized through dialog or action. As a result, the plot flies by, and we are treated to a very concrete, participatory read.

Second, Philip Marlowe tells us almost nothing about himself or his background or even what he's thinking, but we know him better than we know ourselves, thanks to the gritty voice, the nature of his observations, and the conclusions he makes about his world.

"Goodbye" does these things, but slides more towards self-introspection. There are lengthy passages where Marlowe spends time by himself. These passages could seem awkward to the die-hard hardboiled detective fan, but they work. They also show Chandler's writing ability.

In "Goodbye," a writer of popular novels plays a prominent role. Roger Wade writes romance best-sellers; he despises his own genre novels and aspires to write more literary fiction. As a reader of "Goodbye," it's easy to see the paralells between Wade and Chandler, and "Goodbye" seems to be an attempt to write something "literary."

But based on the success of "Goodbye" on its literary merits, it's evident that Chandler wrote the hardboiled dectective novels because he wanted to; not because he couldn't do anything else.

Certainly The Long Goodbye is one of the top ten mysteries written, maybe even the top three. It has that tremendous yet subtle notion of pathos, loyalty, the purity of truth, (perhaps uniqely American) 'stick-to-it-iveness' or relentlessness, and a gritty, scarred, hero.

And certainly Marlowe is the father of a whole bunch of bastard children. Spenser, the oldest, his brother Dave Robicheaux, the darker cousins Lucas (Davenport) and no, not Elvis but Joe Pike.

Juxtapose that against the beauty and insight of Chandler's writing, his voice resonating with the truth about, say relationships. He writes about the war-hero, shattered after the trauma of death, through the words of his wife: "I love my husband. Not as a young girl. That's passed. That man I loved then died in the war. But I love him."

The names and notions intertwine. Marlowe's loyalty to Terry Lennox is the stuff of The Knights of the Realm. The women are tough and knowledgeable. The time is past. Or is it?

Top shelf writing from a man who wrote little but said a lot.

The 1950's saw the end of Hollywood's classic noir period, but in writing "The Long Goodbye," Chandler asserted that his Los Angeles private eye and eternal cynic Philip Marlowe was far from finished even if the decade that made him famous was a memory and the city that inspirited him was gradually losing its sunny, stylish youth to the smog-asphyxiated, television-dominated pit of the modern age. The typical Chandler elements remain unchanged: The women are glamorous and lusty, the gangsters are ruthless but businesslike, the cops are just like the gangsters except they get to carry badges, and Marlowe always stands up to them even when they're beating him down.

The novel begins with Marlowe's recollection of his brief but close friendship with a man named Terry Lennox, an alcoholic socialite with an apparently war-scarred past and an unfaithful wife who happens to be the daughter of one of the country's richest men. One day Lennox shows up at Marlowe's house and asks him to drive him to Mexico; Marlowe concedes, and upon returning finds out that Lennox's wife has been murdered. Soon Lennox is reported to have committed suicide after sending Marlowe a "portrait of Madison."

Some time later, Marlowe is contacted by a book publisher with a request to "babysit" a man named Roger Wade, a popular writer of trashy novels, who has a penchant for violent drinking binges and tends to disappear for days at a time. Marlowe is uninterested in the job at first, but after Wade's stunningly beautiful wife Eileen hires him to find her missing husband, he becomes enmeshed in their affairs. As one of Chandler's best and most poignant character creations, Roger Wade exudes the ironic misery of a man who hates his life because he's so successful making a living at something he finds contemptible.

Are the Lennox and Wade cases connected? If you've read "Farewell, My Lovely," you know that Chandler has a way of tying together plot strands like ribbons around a Christmas present. The difference in "The Long Goodbye" is that Chandler tries to embellish the cleverly twisted plots of his concise earlier novels with longer, more grandiose storytelling and character development, and the result is merely a book that takes longer to read. This is not to say the end is unsatisfying, but it doesn't come as much of a surprise to a Chandler veteran who's intimately familiar with the man's style.

I enjoy Chandler's prose as much as the next person but the colorful descriptives and tough-guy dialog can sometimes start to wear after a few hundred pages. "The Long Goodbye" is both longer and less prone to overdoing the similies and metaphors than other of his novels. Here we have more conventional pacing and exposition in place of neck-snapping plot reversals, and the usual terse and blunt style gives way to more depth and detail. The story never suffers from this dose of subtlety. In fact, it moves along as well as ever. And while at times the characters seem a little less colorful than in other work they also have more depth and internal contradictions that add some substance to what are sometimes stock characters in Chandler's work. A first-time Chandler reader might be more interested in something more typical of the author such as "Farewell My Lovely," but this one is all Raymond Chandler and a winner despite having more subtlety and fewer classic Chandler-isms in the writing style.

Twenty years after I read it the first time, I still hold the same conclusion: The Long Goodbye really might be THE Great American Novel. Period. The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely are great crime novels. But The Long Goodbye goes beyond the genre and is right up there with The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises as an essential American novel.

Suppose life begins to look like it is being viewed through the bottom of a shot glass. The people you see are only marking time until the next powerplay, drink, or fix, or lover. You can't buy-in to the clever excuses the rich, the poor, the crooks or the cops use to justify what they've become.

You'd get a license, a cheap office with a five drawer filing cabinet holding mostly California climate and you'd wait . Wait for that moment when the door from the hallway leading into the waiting room would open and you could just make out the sillouette of your future. You wouldn't get rich. You might get dead. But at least it would be quick. Not like those fools in the suburbs, married to the boss's daughter, dying the slow death in front of the T.V. . . .

If I've struck a nerve, maybe you should turn off the T.V. or the computer and strike out on your own. Maybe you could open your own office, shamus. Or maybe you should try the suit on, see if it fits, strap on the 38, watch a master pull open the desk drawer, pour himself a drink. You could buy this book, sit back and soak up the City of Night.

Compulsively readable.

With the grim inevitability of Robert Bloch's Psycho (ie. a chain of death that looks as if it may not stop), and the wry social commentary of a newer gem like Ed McBain's Ice, this book has it all for the fans of hardboiled murder and mayhem. Toughguys stare each other down, or go for the sucker-punch when that doesn't work. Beautiful women flirt or play hard to get, making our hero Philip Marlowe get personally involved when it ain't the smart thing. Hoodlums wait in doorways with tips to lay off or else. High-society parades itself around in all its vapidness. And it all seems to be producing a string of suicides that just have to be murder, don't they? Although, that first corpse, the poor lady with the bludgeoned kisser that gets the whole thing rolling...now that just had to murder.

The only thing to look out for: Chandler spills revelations where he feels like it, usually in the midst of cynical speeches, or wry repartee; he doesn't collect all the aspects of the puzzle in one big "drawing-room" scene at the end. So, to understand every detail of why all the people got dead, you have to pay attention, and even read between the lines at a few curt bits of explanation, especially when it comes to motivation. But it all seems to tie itself in a neat little bundle of malice and regret.

A classic worth reading.

Chandler is the ultimate dialogue writer and he has a truly impressive grasp of human behaviour.

Through Marlowe's cynical but honest look, he creates the most lovable misantrope in fiction history who has something distinctive to say about anything he sees. "She had an iron smile and eyes that could count the money in your hip wallet" or "He was listening with a plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream"
I sometimes wish that he was in every book I read...

As detective fiction goes, Chandler's novel is as good as it gets. His protagonist is the charmingly frank Philip Marlowe ("It wasn't any of my business. So I ...looked in.") whose wit and matter-of-fact personality makes it fun to go along with him on his adventure. He starts off an innocent bystander, but gets pulled into a massive web of murder and deception, which takes him all over the seedy underbelly of LA in the 1930s.

The novel exhibits technical perfection, is well written with keen description and believable dialogue. The plot is interesting and entertaining, but at times seems a bit implausible. Marlowe's pursuit of truth leads him to bogus psychics and a bogus psychiatric ward, to cops who are at worst scandalous and at best stupid, to the token con artists. At the center of the web are the staples of detective fiction - the fatally attractive women. The novel's two initial plot lines converge into a chaos of dishonesty, and Marlowe finds himself in absurd situations with absurd ways out, and though it requires at least a little bit of an imaginative stretch to continue on the journey unblinkingly, the mishaps are nevertheless entertaining. The novel is well-written and fun, and this makes up for the implausibility several times over.

Even better than the impeccable style and captivating prose is the overreaching theme, constructed well enough even to stay coherent despite the whirlwind of events and characters. Corruption and deceit are at the heart of the novel, and it is up to the incorruptible Philip Marlowe to find the truth as he travels the seamy side of Los Angeles. Nothing is what it seems, including the memorable character, Moose Malloy, a fantastically complex character (like the majority of the novel's dramatis personae).

As a social statement, Chandler's novel deals with gender issues and the nature of success. 1930s America has its own economic myth - as America still does - and stands as a land of opportunity. In this novel, the cost of success for a woman is high, and in this novel, the sacrifice costs everyone. Important to think about what it is Chandler bids "farewell" - worth reading for the punchline; taken with the rest of the novel, the last sentence really sends it home.