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.

Credevo di aver dato già importanti primi posti a quelli che ti fanno a pezzi. Invece no.
Mi unisco alla schiera di quelli che "uno dei miei libri preferiti"? Assolutamente sì. C'è tutto quello che ci serve ricordare qui dentro.

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.

Slightly spoiled by having fallen for Elliot Gould in Leigh Brackett's adaptation, The Long Goodbye is still an overwhelmingly impressive piece of dark literature. When people talk about Chandler's influence on crime fiction it's always in reference to his hardboiled dialogue, his similes and metaphors but in reading this final entry in the Marlowe series you can draw a long powerful line from Chandler through Crumley, Sallis and Block, to name only three, writers who have taken the mantle of writing about society through the eyes of a worn out private detective, it's harsh and bleak and powerfully written and still its packed with wicked dialogue and smart-aleck observations.

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.

Είναι, ίσως, το πιο 'λυρικό' και λογοτεχνικό μυθιστόρημα του Τσάντλερ, και το πιο μεγάλο σε έκταση, όπου ο κυνισμός, η απαισιοδοξία και η απαξίωση, συχνά, εναλλάσσονται - από την άλλη πλευρά, όμως, αργεί ο γνωστός συγγραφέας να 'απογειώσει' την πλοκή, ενώ τα κίνητρα συμπεριφοράς των ηρώων, πολλές φορές, είναι κάπως αδιαφανή. Αρκετά, όμως, εύστοχη παρουσιάζεται η 'ασταθής' μεταπολεμική ατμόσφαιρα των μέσων της δεκαετίας του '50 στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες.

Θεωρείται ένα από τα 3 αριστουργήματα του Τσάντλερ. Το 1955 κέρδισε το βραβείο 'Edgar Allan Poe' Καλύτερου Mυθιστορήματος.

Βαθμολογία: 4,3/5 ή 8,6/10.

Θα γίνει και αναλυτικότερη κριτική στο βιβλίο.

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

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.

Philip Marlowe a cynical shamus looks down at the parking lot of The Dancers Club, watching a drunk be put into his car a silver Rolls Royce, but the annoyed valet has trouble, the left leg refuses to be moved inside, instead remains firmly on the ground. Where the rest of the intoxicated man will soon be also. The pretty red- headed woman sitting next to him or was, in the automobile is very angry with good reason. Turns out she is Sylvia Lennox ex- wife of this inebriated war veteran (Second World War) Terry Lennox, and he has the scars on his face to prove it. Mr. Marlowe not known for being a nice guy, comes down the steps and helps the defenseless Terry up . While the multimillionaire's notorious daughter says she's late for an engagement and goes to get a cab for the lush, Mr. Lennox. Taking the vehicle ( it's hers), speeding away like a race driver towards the finish line. What to do with this pathetic creature, take him home and sober him up thinks Marlowe, can't leave the poor man in the gutter things were different in the last year of the 1940's, besides Thanksgiving had just been celebrated ... Soon these unlikely two become friends , Mr. Marlowe keeps Terry from the drunk tank the next time he sees him, trying to be vertical on the streets of Los Angeles, hustles him away when a cop notices.. . But would you believe it ? This alcoholic friend, living mostly in some dark hole outside, wherever he could find or reach one, remarries the wealthy daughter of Mr. Harlan Potter and is on their second honeymoon in Las Vegas ! From the top to the bottom and back again, sending a hundred dollar check to the astonished Marlowe for all his complications, a few days before Christmas too. .. They later become drinking partners at a dingy bar, but happiness does not last, Mr. Lennox is just a front to keep the promiscuous Sylvia looking respectable, Daddy is a cold conservative, honorable man, no bad publicity, he likes it as much as a stock market crash but a murder is committed, there will be more and Terry is suspected, the hero flees to Mexico with the assistance of Philip, who asks not the right questions, a pal is a pal. The tough police aren't slapping the private detective around, beating him like a punching bag with eyes, not the first time either from criminals or the law, it does still hurt but keeps his trap shut...Jailed, looking out into space (only blankness) waiting and wondering how can he get out of this foolish mess, maybe be incarcerated in San Quentin the big house for years, but has his pride intact... Days later he is sprung, becomes involved with Mr. and Mrs. Wade in the exclusive then San Fernando Valley, Eileen Wade is breathtakingly beautiful, Roger Wade is another drunk but a best- selling writer, needs to stop drinking in order to finish his next book, swords and romance, a favorite of critics it isn't , they however are poor and he is rich ... Philip Marlowe through no fault of his own brings death and sinister lurking gangsters ... Raymond Chandler the king of mystery authors has another great novel which lifts it above the genre into serious, distinguished literature.

“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 enjoyed the atmospherics and mood of this one, the last of Chandler’s detective stories featuring Philip Marlowe. This one is different in being more meditative and in having more of a focus on alienation among the wealthy residents of gated compounds. Chandler also restrains Marlowe’s use of colorful similes in his interior monologues, which became a cliché in many of his imitators. Compared to the earlier tales, Chandler is more judicious here in the playful, sardonic banter Marlowe uses for dismaying and undermining his adversaries, part of his signature cool bravado in the face of danger.

The story begins with Marlowe helping his sensitive alcoholic friend Lennox escape to Mexico, with no questions asked. Soon he learns his faithless, wealthy wife has been brutally murdered, with Lennox the prime suspect. Marlowe stays mum during brutal police questioning and is held in jail for a few days. His initial temptation to investigate the case as a possible frame is undermined by reports of Lennox’s suicide and written confession. The case comes up again when he begins to find links with another PI job. A publisher tries to hire him to uncover the roots of a writer’s block and violent behavior when drinking. Though he turns the job down, the guy’s seductive wife draws him into their situation. A murder takes place that he might have prevented, putting Marlowe into high gear to solve the linked cases and foil the pervasive efforts of powerful forces to suppress the truth.

Despite the troubles with alcohol that beset his two main characters and Chandler himself, he has a wonderful way of capturing the allure Marlowe finds in drinking with Lennox:
“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. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that’s wonderful.” I agreed with him. …
“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.”

Chandler’s prose has some more delights in capturing the casual attitudes of the rich on power of money:
“I’m a big bad man, Marlowe. I make lots of dough. I got to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice in order to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice.

A rich businessmen has his formula for success nicely boiled down:
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.

Marlowe’s jaded attitude about conventional justice is nicely expressed is this diatribe:
“Let the law enforcement people do their own dirty work. Let the lawyers work it out. They write the laws for other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers called judges so that other judges can say the first judges were wrong and the Supreme Court can say the second lot were wrong. Sure there’s such as a thing as law. We’re up to our necks in it. About all it does is make business for lawyers. How long do you think the big-shot mobsters would last if the lawyers didn’t show them how to operate?”

Chandler seems to have some fun with frustrations of the police over mental health concerns in society’s response to crime:
“You two characters been seeing any psychiatrists lately?”
“Jesus,” Ohls said, “hadn’t you heard? We got them in our hair all the time these days. …This ain’t police business any more. It’s getting to be a branch of the medical racket. They’re in and out of jail, the courts, the interrogation rooms. They write reports fifteen pages long on why some punk of a juvenile held up a liquor store or raped a schoolgirl or peddled her to the senior class. Ten years from now guys like Hernandez and me will be doing Rohrschach tests and word associations instead of chin-ups and target practice.

So you get the picture that there is a bit of preaching in this story. But we often never sure which attitudes align with Chandler’s own. I choose to believe the following words of Marlowe are close to his own, and I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek aspects behind them:
“You’re a damn good cop, Bernie, but just the same you’re all wet. In one way cops are all the same. They blame the wrong things. …Crime isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumor, except that the cop would rather cure it with a blackjack. We’re a big tough rich wild people and crime is the price we pay for it, and organized crime is the price we pay for organization. We’ll have it with us for a long time. Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.”
“What’s the clean side?”
“I never saw it. …Let’s have a drink.”

Through this tale we get a dose of the metaphor for the detective as a cynical but good hearted agent who strives to address the social ills of corruption and greed with truth and justice. But here the heroic aspects are infused with the tragic element of impotence in the face of rank consumerism and selfishness in society in the early 50s. Altman as the director of the movie version in 1973 (starring Elliot Gould as a surprise) highlighted the existential and chaotic aspects of this outlook and put a Don Quixote-like aspect to Marlowe’s tilting at windmills.

“I’ve had some rather strange experiences in this house. Guns going off in the night. Drunks lying out on the front lawn and doctors coming who won’t do anything. Lovely women wrapping their arms around me and talking as if they thought I was someone else. Mexican house boys throwing knives. It’s a pity about that gun but you don’t really love your husband do you?”

Private investigator Philip Marlowe has developed a tenuous friendship with the alcoholic and terribly scarred Terry Lennox. When Terry’s millionaire wife turns up dead, Marlowe reluctantly helps Terry run away. Marlowe’s belief in Terry’s innocence causes him to become involved with 3 terrible marriages, a drunken author, the powerful father of the dead wife, some gangsters, and the police who just won’t stop bringing Marlowe in for questioning. Good noir complicated plot and some social commentary. I loved the ending.