Sharp. This book is sharp. The writing is sharp and noir. Through and through, to its bones, the book is noir. It exudes atmosphere, dames, gams, whiskey, chrome revolvers, left-hooks, corruption, purple carpet, split lips, stolen kisses, flickering lights, and rain that never stops.

In some ways this is good and in other ways it's bad. Mostly it's good, but let me start with the bad. The plot and characters must be viewed within the lens of the genre (hardboiled/detective noir) and are in some ways handicapped by this requirement, something Chandler himself acknowledged when he wrote: "To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every writer who is not a hopeless hack." This is further compounded by the fact that Chandler helped create the genre: at the time, his gruff, realistic, human detective Philip Marlowe (a far cry from the many peppy, whimsical Sherlock-imitations) was new and refreshing. Sadly, it's not anymore, and there's not much you can do about it. You can remind yourself that it was new and refreshing all you want but that don't change your gut reaction that you've seen this type of character many many times before. Furthermore, Chandler's style felt, at times, fake, a little forced. Some descriptions and no small amount of dialogue are so VERY noir and so very unnatural. It is a little ironic that an author who advocated writing "realistic" mysteries so readily utilized such stylized dialogue. Like Oscar Wilde's, his dialogue is witty, amusing, and sharp, but it's not realistic:

"Alcohol is like love," he said. "The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off."

"Is that bad?" I asked him.

"It’s excitement of a high order, but it’s an impure emotion—impure in the aesthetic sense. I’m not sneering at sex. It’s necessary and it doesn’t have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it."

But then again who cares about the reality? It's great fun to read. There is a distinct pleasure in reading Chandler's clean and wonderful prose. Viewed as literature in the whole, it's flawed. But within the genre, it's perfect, just perfect. The first chapter alone is filled with startling, enjoyable writing:

-“Sold it, darling? How do you mean?” She slid away from him along the seat but her voice slid away a lot farther than that.

-“Oh, I see.” A slice of spumoni wouldn’t have melted on her now.

-The girl slid under the wheel. “He gets so goddam English when he’s loaded,” she said in a stainless-steel voice. “Thanks for catching him.”

It's not a perfect book. Its flaw are not unavoidable and it is at times over-written. The actions of characters occasionally left me a bit incredulous. Like a zombie movie in which the protagonists consistently make the poor decision to wander into dark stores and alleys. But all said, these are minor complaints, something you simply have to accept if you're going to read and enjoy noir literature. Read the book, there's little reason not to.

ADDENDUM: It seems hard to believe that I read this five years ago, and it is amusing to read this review which is positive but not exactly exuberant. This is funny because, when I mention Raymond Chandler in other reviews [The Last Good Kiss OR Shadow & Claw], I only do so in the most reverent terms. I've found that there are books which at first you love but have no lasting impact on your persona (let us, therefore, admit these are not book LOVES, but book CRUSHES), while other books lodge themselves in your memory like a virus and begin to rewrite and subvert your thoughts. The Long Goodbye is the latter for me.

After reading The Long Goodbye, I picked up and read Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely; The Big Sleep; and Lady in the Lake. Each of these stuck with me, for various reasons, and I now state with no qualification that Raymond Chandler is my favorite author. He changed the way I understood literature. No longer was I satisfied with the depth, style, and wit of Literary prose OR the suspenseful, thrilling, page-turning plot mastery of Genre. No I wanted BOTH. I wanted a book that was both easy to read AND thought-provoking. I wanted both superficiality AND depth. Before Chandler, I might have said that paradox was impossible. Now I know it as accomplished fact, and that is the metric against which I measure every other book.

Now Chandler / noir isn't for everyone. Famously (for me), I remember buying Big Sleep & Lady in the Lake from a B&N and the clerk saying to me, "Wow you can read these? It's like reading a whole other language." Which I thought was dumb, but of course, as I said, it is VERY stylized writing and dialogue. A ready wit is no guarantee that you will like the book, but it is a requirement to do so. Either way, I think absolutely every book reader should at least give ONE Raymond Chandler a chance, and The Long Goodbye is one of the best.

When you can guess the author, after reading only a few pages of any of his products, there is the certain sign that this one is ( or will be ) a classic. Women, booze, slang, adventure, twist, all of them are here, in a trade-mark product.

That's the case with Mr. Chandler and his Marlowe, even if The Long Goodbye is quite a little bit too long...

Three-ish stars for storytelling that’s complex and layered with reflection and social commentary, on a platform of direct, uncomplicated language and a singular voice that helped define the steely private eye navigating a dark, gritty world.

The powerful writing and, in historical context, the story are certainly worth more than three stars. But for me, the rear view mirror of many decades of shifting context greatly diminishes the effect.

As deft, iconic, and commendable as the writing is, it is of a time and doesn’t necessarily hold up as a contemporary read.

The snappy patter, armor of sarcasm, and hardened world view have been done, and overdone, so much that the real thing, the standard-setter, suffers at this point.

The how-many-varieties-of-tough-guy-can-I-shove-into-a-story approach was surely more appreciated seventy years ago than it is generations later.

This is a classic in the genre that I wanted to experience. So I did and now it’s done. I appreciate Chandler the writer and the writing, and find he’s better left on the shelves of crime fiction history than on my reading list today.

Philip Marlowe, the protagonist of this noir mystery, is the template that all gruff world-weary detectives in fiction are modeled on, so even if you've never read a Marlowe mystery, it will feel very familiar and comfortable. The inner dialog and the quick quips are a lot of fun to read. The slang of the times also creates an interesting reading experience, and it is surprisingly easy to pick up.

There is a strong class message in this book. Those with wealth and power are shown to be the most miserable and desperate of people. However, it does seem that everyone is miserable in this world. It's just that the powerful pretend that they are not, while those without power know they are miserable, and there is some power in admitting the truth of one's situation. That's how it seems in Marlowe's world anyway.

The area where this book fails is in its depiction of women and Mexicans. However, at the time this book was published these were not prominent concerns. On the positive side, current readers who are looking for works to criticize academically might find this of interest.

I can't say enough good things about Raymond Chandler. He took one of the lowest, scummiest, quick cash-in forms of writing, the private eye novel, and turned it into legitimate literature. Every paragraph boils over with some kind of allusion, metaphor, or analogy that you'd never imagine in your life, yet afterwards you don't know how you looked at the world in any other way. His cynicism is note-perfect- bitter and sad, but with plenty of humor and just the slightest hint of hope for human decency. This book is one of this longest and most complex. There are some loose ends in the plot that are ultimately left hanging -Chandler was a bit of drunk- but that's easily forgivable given the depth of the characters and the layers to the story. A classic.

Možda je nepravedno ali je svejedno istinito: kad god čitam Čendlera, podsetim se koliko je Hamet bolji.
A dobar je i Čendler, s velikim uživanjem zapliće i mrsi svoje klupko (do kraja malo i pretera), žene su mahom prelepe i fatalne, muškarci malo raznovrsniji, ali najčešće suvo duhoviti, Marlou pije kao smuk i cinično kritikuje društvo i ljudski rod kao takav, da bi se, kad prigusti, pokazao kao neizlečiv romantik. Standardno i standardno dobro.
(Ali ipak: Čendlerov noar fazon je lakše imitirati, pa stoga i parodirati, nego Hametov. Nema tog Čendlera koji može da dobaci do Crvene žetve.)
U ovom konkretnom slučaju mora se pohvaliti i prevod Aleksandra Markovića koji je nekako baš po meri i kolokvijalan i živ i koristi starinski žargon baš kako treba u ovom kontekstu. Odavno nisam videla tako uspešno uzgred iskorišćenu onu odvratnu reč "faćkalica".

Apparently, Chandler regarded this as his best book and I can see why. It’s longer than his other Philip Marlowe novels and this gives the author space to look a little deeper into his characters.

Two of the characters, Terry Lennox (an alcoholic war veteran) and Roger Wade (an alcoholic author), are clearly proxies for Chandler himself. This, to me at least, makes this book the most personal of the series. He speaks through these characters, not only via their dialogue and actions but also by the way other characters talk about them. Interestingly, Chandler chooses to kill both these characters off during the course of the book.

I found this novel to be like a Marlowe novel turned up to eleven. (Why don’t you just make ten louder?) It has everything I’ve come to expect from these books but moreso. As such, I enjoyed it more too and found it more touching. I’ve just found out that Chandler wrote this book as his wife was dying from a chronic illness. In hindsight, that makes perfect sense.

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.

-tPhilip Marlowe

I compared this book to "Twilight" sort of half joking and yet let me tell you why I think there are some parallels:

Twilight was written for a particular audience of young women and sometime older women who fall for this kind of yearning love of a beautiful and misunderstood half human creature. There is something compelling and romantic about it, even sexual even though there's no sex.

The Long Goodbye may appeal to certain people, probably mostly men who also love comic books, because Marlowe is tough and honest and willing to be beaten up to defend a friend or to keep a secret. He's alone in the world, he's fair, he's tough and good looking, he likes women and drinking and he's able to stand up to the pressure of the most corrupt cops, the wealthy businessmen with their power and bribes, hoodlums with guns are handled although he's always taking some nasty hits to the neck and face to make it all the more gritty and realistic.

However, I thought the story was ridiculously contrived, a lot of the dialogue didn't work for me. Comments back and forth seemed off and didn't flow well. I didn't like one person in the story, even Marlowe. The story paints a lugubrious picture of life and everything and everyone stinks, even the pretty girls and especially their husbands.

2 and 1/2 Stars

”’Alcohol is like love,’ he said. ‘The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. […]’”

They usually drink a lot in those hard-boiled novels, but rarely do they muse on their drinking habits, instead of taking them just for granted, the way they do in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, which was written in 1953, four years after The Little Sister, the fifth of seven novels following the PI Philip Marlowe as he walks the mean streets of Los Angeles. The final novel, Playback, was published in 1958, and when Chandler died one year later, he had got four chapters into the unfinished Poodle Springs. Giving it a little leeway, you can say that the distances between the individual novels would grow longer in the course of the years, which might be a sign of their author finding it more and more difficult to deliver – interestingly, The Long Goodbye has the writer Roger Wade, who is facing the same problem – and that Chandler might have found it hard as well to breathe new life into a literary character that had accompanied him since 1939. He himself regarded The Long Goodbye as his best work and even though there are some rather lengthy passages that might have been done away with and no harm done, I can see why he would think so highly of this novel, which is quite different in tone from all its predecessors.

As a detective novel, The Long Goodbye is probably just middle-of-the-road: Marlowe befriends a guy named Terry Lennox, and when one day Terry needs his help in getting out of the country because his wife was brutally murdered, Marlowe, having an implicit belief in Terry’s innocence, not only drives him to the Mexican border but also undergoes an ordeal of several days when the police subject him to more than just an interrogation, and he still keeps mum for the sake of friendship. Later, he learns that Terry has committed suicide after penning down a full confession of the crime. Again, a little later, Marlowe falls in with the writer Roger Wade and his wife Eileen: Roger has a drinking and a drug problem, partly because writing novels is putting more and more pressure on him, partly, however, because there seems to be some dark or uncomfortable secret that has slipped from his mind and that he tries to get to the bottom of by hitting the bottle. All in all, the mystery plot is extremely threadbare and relies too heavily on coincidence – so much so that it is almost ludicrous.

But who reads Chandler exclusively, or even at all, for his plots?

The first thing I noticed once again is that in point of style, Chandler is head and shoulders above all the other mystery writers that I know. Would you fancy a sample? This is from Roger Wade’s written self-reflexions:

”’Well, I took it. Both hands. Poured it in the glass, too. Hardly spilled a drop. Now if I can hold it without vomiting. Better add some water. Now lift it slow. Easy, not too much at a time. It gets warm. It gets hot. If I could stop sweating. The glass is empty. It’s down on the table again.

‘There’s a haze over the moonlight but I set that glass down in spite of it, carefully, carefully, like a spray of roses in a tall thin vase. The roses nod their heads with dew. Maybe I’m a rose. Brother, have I got dew. Now to get upstairs. Maybe a short one straight for the journey. No? Okay, whatever you say. Take it upstairs when I get there. If I get there, something to look forward to. If I make it upstairs I am entitled to compensation. A token of regard from me to me. I have such a beautiful love for myself – and the sweet part of it – no rivals. [..]’” (p.524)

This is not only an example of the superiority of Chandler’s style, which amply recompenses a reader for the shortcomings of the plot, but also of the writer’s true concerns: He wants to say something that really matters and not only entertain his readers – strangely, this is another parallel between Chandler and his character Roger Wade, who makes his money by writing prurient historical fiction but wants to create something more lasting and valuable. Both Wade and Terry Lennox have a drinking problem – exactly like Chandler himself – and the problem of alcoholism looms large in this novel without being romanticized. We see the dire consequences of addiction in Wade’s life, and we are also invited to think about possible reasons why people are on the bottle. In both these men’s cases, the big wars of the 20th century might have had something to do with it. Apart from personal issues like alcoholism or writer’s blockade, Chandler also uses this novel to express his rather disillusioned view of society – of general callousness, of corruption – a side-plot involves the connections between the police and gambling rackets and how Marlowe gets caught in the crossfire between mobsters and the police –, of the culturally levelling effects of mass consumption and of the social consequences of the war. When Marlowe rebukes Terry Lennox for mixing with what he calls “hoodlums”, the other man says, ”’That’s just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it. […]’” (p.381). Harlan Potter, a cynical and embittered businessman, who owns nearly all the newspapers in town, a little later undertakes a sweeping swipe against contemporary society, from which I quote just a few thoughts:

”’[…] We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union, or what have you expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial use of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on. […]’”(p.547)

What a jaundiced rant this is, but also how well it succeeds in summing up even our present-day societies in all their poor hypocrisy. Marlowe aptly and elegantly retorts to this, and later tells the man’s daughter, ”’Fine. He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He’s going to let it go on for a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he’s apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order’” (p.549) but there is little doubt that Chandler himself was maybe not too far away from sharing this bleak outlook on life. After all, his hero Marlowe has grown quite melancholic and more helpless in his romantic ideals than before, which can also be seen from the fact that the sappy witticisms, up to now a trademark of his, have become rather far and few between. Apart from that, Marlowe has to learn a final and dire lesson, namely this – that friendship is, in Ambrose Bierce’s words, a ship that is able to carry two people in fair weather, but generally only one in foul. And this is probably the longest goodbye Marlowe has ever had to say …

To tie it all up, The Long Goodbye will definitely disappoint any reader who is after a suspenseful crime story rich in twists and surprises but it is an impressive legacy of a writer who, through sad experiences of his own – at the time of writing this, Chandler’s wife was terminally ill and he was seriously contemplating suicide – and through his view of society, was becoming more and more pessimistic and fed up. I must say that the older I get, the more I think I would have got on like a house on fire with Mr. Chandler.

Note: The page references in my review refer to the Penguin Modern Classics edition The Big Sleep and Other Novels.

“To say goodbye is to die a little.”

While we may know The Big Sleep (1939) best of all Raymond Chandler’s works maybe primarily because of its film adaptation featuring Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe, and indeed it is (as a book, I mean, in addition to the film) a masterpiece, one of the best novels ever--and if you have only seen the film, you should also read it--I am here to say that The Long Goodbye (1953) is even better, that takes my “masterpiece” and raises it to eleven. Oh, you could make arguments for Farewell, My Lovely and a couple others as masterpieces, too. But I’m in good company in voting for Goodbye; Chandler himself thought it was his best book.

Chandler is the great stylist of detective fiction, but sometimes he can come off as just delightfully clever (which is still a lot, really, if you like entertaining reading, of course!). But in these books he uses his style to invent Marlowe, who is a terrific character, and this character-making is his chief priority.

Here’s Marlowe’s own quick sketch of his character: “I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.”

So to be fair, saying Chandler is “just” clever means you still highlight half the sentences in each of his books. But in addition to bringing to life Marlowe, the cleverness in this book pays serious attention to something he sometimes finds less important in many of his other books: A well-designed plot. The Big Sleep is sometimes seen as convoluted (though I personally don’t care), but The Long Goodbye is a carefully complicated tale, with a lot of parallelism and (I’ll call them) doppelgangers (all the guys reflecting on each other in certain ways), and there’s a couple surprises in the ending that are also very satisfying.

There is serious attention in an auto-fictional way to alcoholism, too, from the alcoholic Chandler, as both of the chief secondary characters Marlowe befriends, Terry Lennox and Roger Wade, are alcoholics. Marlowe (who is not, by the by, Chandler) sips his drinks, and stops drinking them when he is around these clearly needy friends, so that’s interesting.

Sure, we know now alcoholism is a disease, and hard to cure, but then even more than now it was seen as an issue of personal responsibility and commitment (which it may be; I am not a doctor): “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

Chandler famously told producer John Houseman that he could not complete the manuscript for The Black Dahlia unless he was drunk, to which Houseman agreed, providing him all the booze he asked for, and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. But his insights about the disease run throughout: “A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.”

Here Wade says, about drinking, to Marlowe:

“I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation.”

“Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?" "It takes about three years." "Three years?" He looked shocked. "Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.”

Lawrence Block, an alcoholic who wrote a detective series featuring a detective Matt Scudder, may have been in part inspired in his depiction of Scudder’s struggles with drinking by Chandler especially in this book.

The book isn’t exclusively about alcoholism, though it is there on almost every page; it is as much about one of the typical base human emotions we see in noir novels (desire/jealousy), as we see there are links in this book between one central woman and the two men. There’s also the promise of a more serious relationship the promiscuous Marlowe may have with a woman, Linda Loring, though that does not come to fruition until his last, unfinished book, Poodle (for Palm) Springs.

Another topic: Writing and writers. Wade sells out his talent to make a lot of money writing crappy books that everyone wants. There’s an innovative chapter, too, that is comprised solely of the notes the drunk Wade wrote to himself about writing. This is in part a reflection of Chandler as writer and an insightful reflection on writing and drinking.

As with most noir writers, Chandler’s target is capitalism, where the rich grind their heels into the poor, and where “crime isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom,” and where “Organized crime is just the dirty side of a dollar.”

“There ain’t no clean way to make a million bucks.”

“Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of war, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation – all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals.”

“There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.”

More examples of vintage Chandler-noir speak:

“Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.”

“There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.”

“Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.”

*I like good cop Ohls.

As Graham Greene said of Chandler, he was in comparison to Patricia Highsmith a Boy Scout of virtues; a cynical man, like Highsmith was cynical, but unlike Highsmith, Chandler also is essentially a good man, who operates according to a code of ethics, doing the right thing, advocating for the poor in a brutal capitalist society. “I hear voices crying in the night and go and see what’s the matter.” I like Chandler for that; there's a little hope in his otherwise existentialist tone.

One thing that makes this a superb book, better than most of his other books, is the plot, which I can’t discuss without giving too many things away, but I love it. There is a murderer, and people die, and Marlowe figures that out. I like the 1973 neo-noir Robert Altman adaptation featuring Elliot Gould as Marlowe, too, though I much prefer Bogart. But I love this book.

I was a little underwhelmed by The Big Sleep but liked it well enough that I thought I might over the course of a few years read all the Marlowe mysteries in order. But when late last year a friend of mine read The Long Goodbye, the sixth Marlowe mystery, and gave it a rare (for him) five stars, it occurred to me that civilization might very well collapse before I got a chance to read books #2-5, and at that point the pages of The Long Goodbye would be needed as kindling to warm the intrepid band of survivors I'd no doubt be a part of. I'd known for at least a couple of years that this book was going to be great, so why not just read it?

The plot isn't quite as difficult to follow as that of The Big Sleep, and yet there's a very elusive quality to this novel. In an early passage, as Marlowe sits in a bar waiting for a client and pitilessly observing the foibles of human nature (one of his favorite hobbies), he notices a man sitting and talking the bartender's ear off:

He wanted to talk and he couldn't have stopped even if he hadn't really wanted to talk...you knew that he got up on the bottle and only let go of it when he fell asleep at night. He would be like that for the rest of his life and that was what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. A distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world.

And that's the case for most of the characters in the novel, as well. Terry doesn't know if he really killed Sylvia. Roger Wade doesn't know why he can't write anymore. The reader doesn't know if Eileen was really in love with a sailor who disappeared in Norway during the war (and doesn't know if Eileen really knows), and Marlowe doesn't know why he's so fond of Terry. But even these are just the most obvious questions, the plot points that a reader expects resolution to. What contributes to the unique atmosphere of this book, I think, is that Chandler is always hinting at something deeper.

This is very much a postwar novel, as well. We always hear that the 50s were a time of optimism and affluence in America, but Marlowe is preoccupied with the portents of a new world that's coming into being, a world of mass advertising and consumerism in which organized crime is "just the dirty side of the sharp dollar", and where the wealthy enjoy "one long suntanned hangover." Terry proposes the existence of this world to Marlowe, early on:

"Randy doesn't bother. In Las Vegas he's a legitimate businessman. You look him up next time you're there. He'll be your pal."
"Not too likely. I don't like hoodlums."
"That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it."

I guess it's not surprising to read that Chandler started writing after he lost his job in the Depression, because he writes like someone completely disillusioned with America. Not disillusioned however because of having lost, but because of the hollowness of the game itself. Sylvia's father Harlan Potter is an especially fascinating character in this respect, Marlowe at one point flippantly summing up the man's perspective- "You don't like the way the world is going so you use what power you have to close off a private corner to live in as near as possible to the way you remember people lived fifty years ago before the age of mass production. You've got a hundred million dollars and all it has bought you is a pain in the neck"- as well as the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who's miserable despite all the money he's made on his popular sex-and-swordplay novels.

Chandler is also one of those rare writers who's able to combine profound depth of character and theme with a truly compelling plot. As I mentioned, I didn't find it as ungraspable as that of The Big Sleep, in fact I'm pretty certain I was able to follow it (having seen the Altman movie twice definitely helped, even though there are significant differences), but its complexity and precision coexist with its ambiguity- ambiguity not so much in terms of what happens, but why it happens. The greatest mysteries lie within ourselves. Another reviewer mentioned that they found Marlowe's passivity in this novel strange. But the novel is stranger than that, it's almost as if this entire story sort of happens to Marlowe, almost as if Sylvia's killer wants to be caught.

Furthermore, if Marlowe hadn't liked Terry enough to try to help him, there might not have been any story at all. Or it wouldn't have involved Marlowe, anyway. In other words, it all hinges on an impulse that even he doesn't understand. Their friendship reminded me somewhat of The Great Gatsby, although Marlowe never envies or mythologizes Terry in the way that Nick initially does Gatsby. Some might consider it a flaw that what Marlowe sees in Terry is never made explicit. But I think we know enough to speculate. Terry lives among the wealthy, sure, but deep down he despises it and despises them; Marlowe recognizes Terry as someone who's been changed forever by the war, a "moral defeatist" who can now live in any way, under any code of morality, as long as he's comfortable. Seems to me that Marlowe is a crusader at heart (it surprised me to realize this, especially given the way Elliott Gould plays him throughout most of the movie), and he's responding to someone who could have been an ally, should have been, but who no longer has the ability to care.

That's a theory, anyway. On the other hand, sometimes friendship is a mystery. And as much as I love the Altman film, the one thing that I think it's missing, that Chandler's novel depicts so movingly, is that feeling of having a friend who's doomed, who might even have done something terrible, but still you can't help but love him. As Marlowe thinks, "He had been a man it was impossible to dislike. How many do you meet in a lifetime that you can say that about?"

“I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye



Labels like genius and masterpiece get thrown around a lot in the arts. Certain writers are deemed to be brilliant and yet their stars fade quickly. Their notable books are soon forgotten, misplaced, unread and eventually pulped. Other writers seem to have the opposite trajectory. They are viewed as pulp or genre writers, but over time they seem to transcend the genre and even seem to dance on the graves of labels. They are iconic. Raymond Chandler is one of those later writers.

He is one of the Holy Trinity of detective novelists (along with Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain). These are the men who built the hard-boiled noir house that everyone else lives in. He is a god and a poet. His dialogue seems to have just fallen directly from the swollen lips of a trash-talking demiurge. His novels are both the burn and the bush. His prose is both the wilderness and the mountain. He can kill-off the Alpha and seduce the Omega before you recognize your own face in the cracked mirror.

I can't think of a modern writer of detective or crime fiction that shouldn't be paying Chander's heirs some form of rent. I can't imagine a writer who wants to include a gun and a woman and a detective in a novel NOT consulting Chandler's novels for hints of inspiration. Obviously, I adore the genre and the writer, but even if I work hard to remove my own biases it is difficult to walk away from 'The Long Goodbye' without recognizing what a gift was thrown at our underserving, flat feet.