I found an abridged version,a good thing too as the original length of nearly 400 pages would have tested my patience.

Prior to this,I had watched the movie version of Chandler's The Big Sleep,which despite the presence of Bogart and Bacall wasn't all that memorable.

Chandler reportedly called The Long Goodbye his best work.If that was the case,it dampens my enthusiasm for the rest of his books.

I liked it to start with,but as it progressed,it became increasingly convoluted.Philip Marlowe,private detective,resembles the private eyes I've frequently encountered in the books of James Hadley Chase.

Although the writing style is similar,the books of James Hadley Chase move at a much faster pace and are certainly not as convoluted.Chase was also a much more prolific author compared to Chandler.

Anyway,my first book by one of the pioneers of hardboiled pulp fiction didn't leave too great an impression.

Ugh. Let my library loan expire before transcribing my favorite quotes--so winging it.

This was my first Chandler book and definitely not my last. The sense of LA is very strong and while the lingo and sociological norms may have shifted, the underlying struggles the characters were grappling with are definitely still relevant, today. That's a big win for me and so was the book.

Thanks Allie for the suggestion and Carol, to you both for the buddy read. 'Til next time, bellas.

“Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life … is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.”

Marlowe befriends a down-on-his-luck war hero roaming the streets of California. A few months after Marlowe cleans him up and sets him on his way, the man is standing on Marlowe’s doorstep, holding a gun and asking for a ride to Mexico. While Marlowe refuses to hear out the reason for this request, it’s revealed that the man’s wife has been murdered and it may or may not be by his new friend’s hand.

With those rather shady circumstances still hazing over his head, Marlowe is approached by a publisher asking for his assistance in figuring out just what exactly is throwing their prized writer off his rocker. Marlowe initially disagrees but before long, he’s pulled in by the author’s stunning wife. Can Marlowe narrow down the reason for the writer’s madness? Are the two cases connected? Is Marlowe in over his head?

While there’s still another novel to follow (Playback), The Long Goodbye is widely considered Raymond Chandler’s swan song to arguably literature’s greatest detective. Often cited as the gold standard in crime fiction, The Long Goodbye snapped up the Edgar Award for best novel in 1955, is listed on countless “best of” compilations and has influenced a generation of mystery and crime writers.

Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye during a very difficult time in his life. His wife was terminally ill and he was suffering from bouts of depression and alcohol abuse. It’s been noted that a few of the characters in the novel were used as a way for Chandler to clear his mind. He used them to express his innermost thoughts on the state of society, his frustrations as a writer and his internal struggle with whether or not he should commit suicide.

It’s been said before – by myself and others – that the plot in Chandler’s Marlowe novels can almost be considered secondary to the author’s writing. As usual, Chandler is in top form here as he calls out society’s apathetic trend, the hypocrisy of the police force and the power of money.

There’s so much to love about this novel and in my opinion, it’s the finest of the series. Given the circumstances surrounding its creation, it’s hard to ignore the personal nature of the writing. At heart, both Chandler and Marlowe are very cynical people and Marlowe literally offends every person he comes into contact with. I suppose that’s nothing new but it reflects Chandler’s state of mind at the time. You almost wonder if Marlowe couldn’t care less whether he lives or dies at the end of the day. He’s a solitary individual who could give a damn what you or anyone else thinks of him, all that matters is the truth. That’s a very dangerous man and that’s the best kind of detective.

Also posted @ Every Read Thing.

Chandler had become my favorite author somewhere between The Big Sleep and The Little Sister. I had saved this book to savor when I was jostling for a quality read cause I knew its chances of disappointing me were pretty low. The last true Marlowe novel (there are two more books in the series one of them a novella another one finished after Chandler's death) was a bittersweet read. It did not flow like his previous hardboiled mysteries, the two books mentioned earlier were probably better examples of the genre but it could be debated this no way hindered The Long Goodbye from being the better book.

Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran Terry Lennox and tries to help him escape the country when he is charged with his cheating wife's murder. In an unrelated case Marlowe is tasked with stopping an alcoholic author from hurting himself or his family.

All the previous novels had a singular case with Marlowe diving into the deep end of the pool from the get go. The whole structure is turned upside down in The Long Goodbye. Terry Lennox is less of a case and more of a friend in a jam while the other case involves babysitting an idiot which does not sound as interesting as the murder and mayhem that Marlowe witnessed in the previous books. But the twists ramp up and the bodies start to pile in true hardboiled fashion and the resolution comes much quicker than expected. There is a late twist but it is not of the most memorable variety.

The most deplorable and vapid character is the victim which ensures the suspects gallery is not made up of the usual boisterous brutes or the despicable damsels. Most supporting characters garner sympathy as they have been dealt a hand that they are ill equipped to play with. An alcoholic writer caught wallowing in self pity unable to do the one thing he is supposedly good at that is expressing himself coherently. His stoic wife caught between dreaming of an unrequited love and performing her duty to her husband. The victim's sister who oscillates between vulnerable and viscous. And then there is Marlowe.

Philip Marlowe isn't just the most important character in the book, he is the book. The book is an examination of Marlowe's idea of morality. Since the last book (The Little Sister) Marlowe had shifted from sarcasm to gallows humor, from having a healthy mistrust of optimism to outright pessimism and here he is tired, angry, bitter, cynical and still refusing to quit. His version of morality is not one associated with idealism or nobility. It isn't the shallow morality of a a callow cynic. He is moral because he has too much self respect to walk away from doing what he knows is the right thing. He realizes that morality is foolish, it is easier to look the other way and walk into the sunset and all that stops him is his broken pride. This dichotomy of a cynical man in a corrupt world and his self awareness makes Marlowe my favorite character. His quotable quips and witty one liners are there but it's his worldview which I find the most interesting thing about him. He struggles with doing the right thing like all of us and does it anyway even knowing it isn't in his best interest.

Chandler's writing had been described as beautiful, descriptive, elaborate and insightful. In this novel it's all that but more than that it's haunting, not a word used to describe pulp fiction but not a word that I use lightly. His simile laden descriptions are there but it's when he comments on society or marriage - "For two people in a hundred it's wonderful. The rest just work at it." that one can't help nod along and wonder how eerily correct his words are even sixty years down the line. It ensures The Long Goodbye like other Marlowe novels and unlike most mystery books isn't just a story about the destination - unearthing the final piece of puzzle who killed who; but more about the journey - the brilliant evocative writing that steals every scene.

Any medium of mass entertainment be it movies, tv, books has two main functions to entertain without insulting the intelligence of its patrons or to be interesting and say something that's worth paying heed to. Chandler is one of those unbelievably rare examples in the world of mass entertainment (nowadays called pop culture) across different eras who says something interesting in an entertaining manner. If that's not enough to convince anyone to give him a chance nothing will.

Chandler in the introduction to Trouble is my Business (a collection of Marlowe stories) states that there are no classics in the mystery genre. It's a genre unlike the more literary ones where the glass ceiling had not yet been breached and probably won't ever be. But in this book he has done enough to prove himself wrong. Rating - 5/5

So I've never read any Chandler, but Ann Patchett has a reference to this one in her collection of essays: Story of a Happy Marriage and so my husband brought it home from the used book store. He couldn't finish it: "too much gumshoe".

I don't mind the camp, and one can certainly understand where Bogart got his character from (holy Marlowe), but he does lay it on thick sometimes. The story is real though (including all the layers of a pre-Scooby Doo, Scooby Doo ending) AND as a bonus Chandler makes lots of real commentary (including skepticism over prescription drug usage). Some of it is rather prescient for his time (published in 1953), some of it is wise, and some of it is just great turn of phrase. I'll let his words speak for themselves for the most part:

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

"A girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure was climbing the ladder to the high board. I watched the band of white that showed between the tan of her thighs and the suit. I watched it carnally....She wobbled her bottom over to a small white table and sat down beside a lumberjack in white drill pants and dark glasses and a tan so evenly dark that he couldn't have anything but the hired man around the pool. He reached over and patted her thigh. She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh by the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed."

"There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish."

"The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of wars, 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. He has to buy food for his family. In or time we have a seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can't expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can't have quality with mass production. You don't want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn't sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average American housewife can't produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry."

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.

I’m adding this to my list of favorite opening lines. Twenty-three words that set up a story with precision and punch. This sentence is why I decided to read my first Raymond Chandler.

Chandler’s crime noir characters and images are iconic: Philip Marlowe, the embittered, enigmatic private eye; the long-limbed blonde, elegant, cunning and in need of rescue; the corrupt and brutal criminal justice system; tawdry Los Angeles, emerging from World War II to become the symbol of American excess. He, along with his contemporaries Dashiell Hammett (creator of Sam Spade) and James Cain (Double Indemnity), created a writing and thematic style as American as jazz and Route 66.

I expected heavy drinking, snappy dialogue and dames in mink stoles. I also expected a dated and a bit quaint feel to the style, story and substance of the plot. I was spot-on with the former, dead wrong with the latter. From the opening sentence, this is as fresh and cruel as any novel I have read by a contemporary writer, mystery or not. It is also deeply personal without being self-conscious, a rare quality that I can’t quite explain, but know it when I read it. Chandler’s socially relevant and self-reflective themes are woven seamlessly into the narrative instead of being called out by plot twists or caricatures. (It may be helpful to know that two characters in The Long Goodbye, a drunk writer losing his touch and a war vet losing his mind, are stand-ins for the writer himself. Chandler wrote this novel while his wife was dying. He had already succumbed to alcoholism and fought profound depression).

Marlowe’s voice is pithy, empathetic, tragic and wry. Yet Chandler works some sort of literary magic so that we see each character, not as filtered through Marlowe’s hungover eyes, but as clearly as if though we were in room for each scene, standing off stage right. We’re always in Marlowe’s head and he’s a solitary guy, but the pacing never wavers for all the time he spends alone.

It’s almost impossible to turn off my writer’s brain while reading The Long Goodbye, for its execution is sublime, but as a reader, it’s a story I couldn’t put down. It also gave me a serious jones for gimlets:

We sat in the corner bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.

I’ll be back for more. Chandler, that is. Go easy on the gin.

When it comes to Raymond Chandler’s novels starring the smart-ass, misanthropic PI Phillip Marlowe, there’s The Long Goodbye and then there's everything else Chandler ever wrote—and it’s a long, lonely drive in-between. The Big Sleep, Farwell, My Lovely, and The Little Sister are all seminal works of the hard-boiled genre, too be sure; and on any other day of the week each is its own fuel-injected suicide machine; but in a bare-knuckled brawl, these books are packing wet noodles for arms when they walk into the Thunderdome and go up against the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla that is The Long Goodbye.

I was worried going into this book, on account of one of my most-loved and worshipped novels of all time, James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, is in part based off of this book (Crumley has said more than once in interviews that every good idea he had, he stole from Raymond Chandler). Luckily, these two novels are very separate beasts; while both feature plot-threads involving alcoholic, asshole authors, they go their own separate, heart-stomping ways.

If put on the spot for a fortune-cookie summarization of the two books, I’d say the The Last Good Kiss is about the fleeting temporality of love and the lingering heaviness of its loss, while The Long Goodbye, more than anything, is a slow-burning rumination on the nature of friendship.

In the earlier novels, all the events transpire usually under 48 hours, with Marlowe getting assigned a case in the first few pages, and then finding the first in a long trail of dead bodies by page 20. The Long Goodbye begins with a jarring but lovely change of pacing and tone, with Marlowe forging a chance-friendship with a charming loser of a war veteran. Weeks and months pass before the first body shows up around the fifty page mark, and it’s not until somewhere around the 100-page mark that the first signs of a case actually appear.

For a certain breed of mystery reader, this will probably sound like a terrible prospect, but then again, I am a different kind of mystery reader. I believe the genre can be a powerful medium for morality tales that can tackle all sorts of issues that I find important (i.e. the nature of good and evil, mortality, social injustice, the fallible nature of the American dream) and can be written in prose that is subtle, poetic, and painful. Bottom line: I consider mystery novels—when they are truly well-written and truly about something—as important as any other well-cherished work of literature.

I don’t really have it in me to try and give you a zesty teaser on the plot of this novel, some hokey hook that’ll make you say “Gee Wiz” and click on the want-to-read button. This book tired me emotionally, and I mean that in the best possible way. So I’m going to take my curtain call with this last bit: if you are a reader who loves a layered, complex story with characters whose motivations are hidden behind the veil of what is being said at any moment (including—in fact, especially—the narrator, Marlowe), if you enjoy a book that actually requires you to actively read, then this is a book I’d recommend.

Rest assured, there are murders and criminals and femme fatales and tough talk and shady characters and two-timing lovers and dirty cops and mysteries intertwined with mysteries, but all that’s just the icing on top. What’s underneath is where things get good.

Mucho más intensa y compleja que en anteriores entregas, la novela "El largo adiós" no va tan directa al grano, sino que se entretiene en reflexiones sobre lo divino y lo humano, salta entre diferentes casos que investiga el detective, diferentes protagonistas e historias que se mezclan. Todo, por supuesto, en ese ambiente de millonarios angelinos, mujeres fatales y hombres condescendientes, enormes mansiones y dinero que no da la felicidad.
Está novela llena de giros nos muestra un Marlowe más humano; aunque sigue siendo el mismo tipo duro de siempre, es emotivo, siente culpabilidades y compasión y puede dejarse arrastrar por la amistad o la lealtad en vez de estar, como de costumbre, solo contra el resto del mundo.

Tom was a quiet, reserved kind of guy. Which at the time was unusual within my circle of friends. Most everyone I knew back when I first returned to Sheffield was a lush, a druggie or just plain crazy. I made friends in pubs and clubs. My friends didn’t exist in the daytime. Except Tom. He was 24/7. Normal. I was in a bad way myself, although I couldn’t see it. Perhaps the company I kept gave me a false sense of my emotional and physical well-being. When J is getting the sack because he has been on a Ketamine binge and can’t stand up for two days, and Alison is turning up for lectures with semen in her hair, you don’t feel so crummy. Everything is relative.

And everything pointed to Tom outlasting every one of us. You didn’t talk about it. You just knew. Only a fool would have thought otherwise. Yeah, Tom made fools of us all. He didn’t dance in clubs, and so you thought he was shy, standing off by himself most of the evening. He made comments about his appearance, and you credited him with a dry, deprecating sense of humour. He didn’t do drugs, didn’t take nameless girls home, and you didn’t judge, you admired him for it. What a sensible guy. If only we could be like him.

Yet sometimes I would wonder. And in my wisdom would take Tom for a drink. It is all I knew how to do. I hoped that would help somehow, that he would see it for what it was: an inadequate but heartfelt gesture of solidarity or empathy. I didn’t know what he was really thinking. You didn’t ask; he didn’t tell. That is just the way it was. And all the while he carried on slipping. A little at a time; almost imperceptibly. Until one day he was gone. The guy we thought would go places, did. And he didn’t come back.

I think about those times a lot. About Tom in particular. Mop-haired Tom, so unassuming. If his name ever now comes up people like to say his situation was hopeless. That is their comfort blanket. That he couldn’t deal with the things that were bothering him, and he couldn’t have been saved. I guess it makes them feel better to think that way. All I know is that whatever he was up against, whatever he was grappling with, he lost. That no longer surprises me. Life is a dirty fighter, I’ve found. Of course, I wish I could have done more. I wish I had. It hurts to know I failed him. Maybe there is nothing I could have done. Some people are not made to endure. But futile effort is like a shot of whisky, it can calm the nerves.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that to say goodbye is to die a little. Well, I never even got to say goodbye. It was a surprise to me that reading The Long Goodbye brought all this back up. It is not something I had expected. I was ready for wise-cracking PI’s, sultry dames, tough guys, and all-round dumb fun, but I wasn’t prepared to be so moved, to have some of my personal sore spots fingered so aggressively. I guess guilt is like a blood stain, it takes a long time to fade. But I don’t want to give the impression that the book is only worthwhile as a kind of Proustian madeleine. The truth is that many of the characters – including Eileen Wade, strangely enough – got to me on their own terms, just like they got to Philip Marlowe. And the credit for that goes to the author.

“The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.”

The novel centres around the lives, and deaths, of two men, Terry Lennox and Roger Wade. As introductions go, Terry’s is one of the best. Marlowe first encounters the man hanging out of a Rolls, blind-drunk. Also in the car is his beautiful ex-wife. Immediately one gets a sense of each character’s personality, or role-to-be in the novel. The ex-wife is hard-nosed, unsympathetic, dispensable; Marlowe is, against his better judgement, and for no personal gain, drawn to Lennox and wants to help him; and Terry is vulnerable, in need of help, and likely to bring in his wake a whole lot of trouble. One understands very quickly that he is one of life’s perennial losers [a word I use without any negative connotation].

Lennox’s physical appearance is also significant. He’s a young man with a shock of white hair and comprehensive scarring on his face [which a doctor has attempted to fix with plastic surgery]. The scars were picked up during the war [and this is also significant, but I’ll touch upon that later]; they act within the novel as a physical representation of his emotional, inner life. Lennox is, both emotionally and physically, damaged goods. Marlowe isn’t in much better condition himself. He’s getting older [he’s 42], wearier. His wise-cracks, which readers seem to so cherish, struck me as angrier, or more bitter than usual, rather than admirable bravado or swagger.



[Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, in Robert Altman’s film version of the book]

What ties Marlowe and Lennox together is that both are, essentially, alone and feeling it. They drift towards each other out of a pretty basic human desire for contact or friendship. It is worth noting that Marlowe doesn’t know why he cares about Lennox. The men do not share interests, they do not really talk to each other all that much, but they could be said to need each other. At the beginning Terry is described by his ex-wife as ‘a lost dog,’ which is apt, but that phrase could also be applied to Marlowe too; in fact, it could be applied to every character in the book. It is interesting that the focus throughout is on moneyed people, privileged people; Chandler seems to be at pains to point out that being flush doesn’t stop you from fucking up, or getting sad. Indeed, The Long Goodbye is a terribly sad book, bleak even; its overriding message is that, as a result of two wars, the world is quickly going down the toilet, that humanity is starting to collapse under the weight of its own faeces. The wars, Chandler suggests, have taken our innocence, and left us worn-out, seedy, cynical and self-obsessed.

I’ve read elsewhere that Chandler intended for The Long Goodbye to be different from his other books. Apparently, he did not set out to write a Marlowe novel, but eventually lost his nerve. Wanting to ditch his famous narrator would indicate that the author was aching to spread his proverbial wings, was perhaps gunning for something more personal and with more depth. If that is so, then one might look to Roger Wade, the alcoholic writer, as the most obvious example, for not only is he different from what one would usually encounter in Chandler’s stuff, but he could even be said to be a stand-in for the man himself. Chandler’s own problems with drink are well-documented, but the parallels between him and Wade are not restricted to that. Both are writers, of course, but both are also struggling with their work. Wade considers himself to be a hack [he writes genre novels, historical bodice-rippers] and is tired of conforming to a formula. He even mentions his reliance upon similes, which is something that Marlowe [and by extension Chandler] also relies upon. Yet if he was taking a shot at himself here, I think Chandler is wrong to put himself down; for me, great similes are an art, and he was something of a master [he describes one man as having a face like a collapsed lung, for example]. In any case, it is clear that he felt dissatisfied with the writing process, that he found working within the PI, hard-boiled genre restricting.

“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.”

To this end, one finds the author experimenting a little. For example, during the Wade storyline one is allowed to read something he wrote while drunk out of his mind, which turns out to be a strange, stream-of-consciousness self-pitying ramble reminiscent of Gass’ The Tunnel or Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry’s great masterpiece. In fact, all the Wade chapters reminded me of Lowry, and that is a big compliment. This is not to say, however, that there isn’t any of the dumb fun I mentioned earlier. There are still dames, and femme fatales; there are murders and mysteries; there are crooks and hoodlums; and there are plenty of great one-liners, and square-jawed, big-balled machismo. It is simply that these familiar, well-worn things run alongside broader, more satisfying existential, moral concerns, while also delivering characters that we feel as though he get to know and care about.

Having said all this, it would be remiss of me to finish this review without mentioning some of the book’s less successful aspects, because it is certainly not flawless. It is episodic, and the structure is pretty poor, but then structure was never Chandler’s strong point. Nor was plot, which, here and elsewhere, is plodding and anti-climatic [although I think that is less of a problem with this particular novel]. A bigger issue, however, is the ending. Indeed, it would be a service to the author to quit about ten pages before the finish line, because the ultimate twist, the reveal [quite literally] is more than a bit silly. It is such a shame that the book ends in disappointment [for the reader and for Marlowe, I guess], because what precedes those final few pages is fantastic. In any case, The Long Goodbye is fit to stand beside any novel you care to name; it is a Shakespearean tragedy, with a two-day hangover and old lipstick smears on its pillow.

“L’alcool è come l’amore. Il primo bacio è magico, il secondo intimo, il terzo un’abitudine. E poi si spoglia la donna”
C’è tutto quello che deve esserci in un romanzo del genere. Come principale protagonista c’è l’alcool, motore e spinta propulsiva della storia, che scorre a fiumi nelle case eleganti dei quartieri più esclusivi e nei bar silenziosi di Los Angeles; ci sono i bulli dal grilletto facile, grandi criminali tenutari di case da gioco in Nevada, messicani dal sangue caliente e con la violenza a fior di pelle; ci sono le pupe, splendide donne eleganti e sensuali che provocano bollori al primo sguardo (anche se poi, quando vai a guardare meglio, trovi marcio sotto pelle); ci sono poliziotti corrotti che girano scortati da gangster nelle strade di Los Angeles; ci sono anche poliziotti onesti che si sentono falliti per aver pensato che il mondo è diviso in due, i buoni e i cattivi da sterminare; ed infine c’è lui, Philip Marlowe, un duro, un cinico, un saggio che ha capito come va il mondo, cui è chiaro come “il potere d’acquisto del dollaro” sia ciò che fa girare le cose, ed il caso che gli si presenta ne è la lampante dimostrazione: la morte della figlia di un milionario californiano, magnate dell’editoria. Marlowe ci si imbatte perché il marito della donna è un suo “amico”, Terry Lennox, con il quale è abituato a condividere succhielli (bibite tipiche californiane, non pensate male!) malinconicamente seduti su uno sgabello del bar Victor. Cosa significa l’amicizia? Per Marlowe molto, tanto da spingerlo a immischiarsi in faccende pericolose, mettendosi in gioco seriamente, pur di salvaguardarla.
Il miglior Chandler letto finora, con un finale imprevisto e molto triste, che lascia con l’amaro in bocca, ma sempre più affezionati al rude investigatore.

Excellent - Just wish I had the unabridged episode cuz it was over almost as soon as it started.

Private investigator Philip Marlowe is 42 years old and does not exercise. His sport is chess yet he does not play against anybody. He just replays games of chess masters and solves chess puzzles. His brushes with danger and death he just narrates matter-of-factly. In one scene a rich, powerful, mean-spirited guy comes to his office. After some tough guy dialogue Marlowe slugs the visitor which made the latter double up in pain while his bodyguard--certainly armed--is just outside. When Marlowe later meets the bodyguard he insults him on his face. Yet they left Marlowe unharmed.

I remember watching an action film. There was a long sequence of running, jumping, fighting, shooting and car chases. Then there was a close-up shot of the handsome face of the same loner-type hero: his face was completely clean, he wasn't even sweating. All throughout the film, even in the scariest situation, his face did not reflect any stress or panic. The most he managed to do was to harden his jaws to reflect grim determination to conquer seemingly impossible odds. Or maybe just to hide his boredom during the film shoot.

Philip Marlowe is such a guy. Calm, stoic, self-assured and fearless. I remember, too, those Arab guys who crashed the planes during 9-11. They accomplished their gruesome task with the same sangfroid as the fictional heroes of films and novels.

Indeed, certitude erases fear completely. Those plane crashers had no doubt that the atomization of their earthly bodies will make them martyrs of the faith and will instantly transport them to Allah's Paradise where they will meet Muhammad with 40 beautiful virgins for each of them ready for distribution. The movie ass-kicking heroes do not sweat or panic because they know, beyond the shadow of doubt, that the director won't kill them no matter how perilous the situation the script puts them in. And Philip Marlowe, like all great characters in fiction, including James Bond himself, knows that in sequel upon sequel, for as long as the books sell, he shall be immortal and indestructible.

Towards the end of this novel, after the crimes had been solved and Marlowe had no more need for macho dialogues, the author finally rewards him naked in bed with a 36-year-old rich, beautiful woman. Then the reader finally realizes that this is not really a detective novel but a religious tract: it teaches that faith works. A firm belief in salvation-no-matter-what can make one live life to the fullest, without fear, and that in the end he shall reap all the pleasures of Paradise.