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."

Chandler's unabashed masterpiece, this novel is his only work to truly transcend the pulp genre and rank as first-rate literature. All of Chandler's books have gorgeous language and bafflingly labyrinthine plots, but this one stands out because of the author's poignant willingness to stare into his own soul. His stalwart, incorruptible hero Marlowe is hired to guard a washed-up, alcoholic, self-loathing writer who derides his own work as trash, and it's hard not to see the troubled Raymond Chandler in that character. This was the second-to-last Marlowe novel Chandler ever completed, and there's a forlorn air of melancholy around the whole thing. It's the best American detective novel, bar none, and the literary equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting.

A powerful tale of bitterness and anger and pain, of Chandler putting his Marlowe on a suicide mission, a story of horrific collateral damage without redemption, and of the betrayal of unwise love. Wow.

The Long Goodbye is Raymond Chandler at his best. Beautifully bleak, blatantly noir, a sense of impermanence, with an underlining need to create justice is an unjust society. Chandler's not so subtle exposé of class and social status compose the backdrop for his twisted tale of love and revenge. He creates loser underdogs as heroes, and then turns then into villains, or leaves them where they are to stay. His uber rich are above the law, but not above fear, self-hatred, deceit, and revenge. There's a continual circle jerk of backstabbing and petty quarrels. But the reader expects it, we can see it all coming as his characters broadcast their every move - and they do it in a good way - as only well constructed characters can. There is nothing one dimensional about them. And even though the book was written almost sixty years ago there's still a lot of similarities to today's headlines. Doctor prescribes drugs that eventually kill his client, he even makes house calls a la Micheal Jackson. Police botch investigation of heiress' death due to powerful industrialist's influence and abundance of money - just as in real life Casey Johnson of the Johnson and Johnson's - her death due to possible drug overdose amid questionable circumstances barely made the news and then next day was forgotten. Cops on the take, politically hungry District Attorneys, rich folks in seclusion hiding behind money - seems the insanity never changes and Chandler gives us a front row seat to all of it in its 1950's L.A. glory.

Marlow is back and drawn into the nightmare world of rich alcoholics, adulterers, and of course, of murder. A solid Philip Marlow story full of twists and ever increasing complications that kept me there right to the end. I enjoyed the experience even I felt it was a tad too long and the Marlow of the books never seems as powerful a character as the one that I got from the movies in my youth.

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.

به نظرم خوب بود. خیلی وقت بود یه کتاب اینطوری نخونده بودم که نتونم ازش جدا بشم و هی بخوام بدونم‌ بعدش چی میشه. فیلمهای کتابای ریموند چندلر رو دیده بودم ولی تا حالا اصل کتاباشو نخونده بودم. در مجموع به نظرم این جزو آثار خیلی خوبش بود. سرنخ هایی که تو متن مطرح میشدن رو دوست داشتم و روندی که برای باز کردن گره ها طی شد هم به نظرم خوب و راضی کننده بود.
در کل به نظرم 4.5 امتیاز خوبیه که گرد بالا میکنم و پنج میدم:)

پی نوشت: هیچ وقت چند روز مونده به امتحان رمان جنایی شروع نکنید:)))

“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.

Queer Eye for the Private Eye

"People have such queer ideas about private detectives."
Raymond Chandler, "The Long Good-Bye" (page 69)

Kiss Me Goodbye (An Ode to Philip Marlowe and Terry Lennox)
[Apologies to Martin Fry and Christopher Marlowe]

I never promised you eternity
I never meant to be unkind
All I gave, you returned to me
Now love's the last thing on your mind.

I never promised you a miracle
What you desired was a guarantee.
This song’s not meant to be satirical
Our love was just a carnal parody.

Nothing in this world's invincible
No one's heart is made of stone
Now I know I'm yours in principle
I'm the one thing you'll never own.

It only took a glass or two of bourbon
(Or were they gimlets?) downstairs at Victor’s
No way could our love be that suburban
We held each other like two constrictors.

I can’t recall what I metaphor
She seemed to be like a simile
You were more queenly than sophomore
Adorned with your silver filigree.

If I promise you infinity
There's so much more to share with you
Did you expect the holy trinity
In all I say and all I do?

Let me tell you this much, man to man,
There’s no love any greater than this
If you’ll be my star, I’ll be your fan
Make me immortal with just one kiss.

When you left, you were invisible
Although I drove you to the airport
I thought we’d be indivisible
Even if one of us had been caught.

It's not emotional extravagance
We said farewell a thousand times
Why pretend there'll be a second chance
Unless this last kiss changes your mind?

If you can live your life without me
Turn and walk away
Minutes turn to hours
Hours turn to days
If you can't stand a single moment
Then go but kiss me goodbye.


SOUNDTRACK:

ABC - "Kiss Me Goodbye"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrJP2...

I reread Chandler's private eye novel. Lots of nice touches are found in it. He even takes a few swipes at T.S. Eliot. Marlowe is now 42. He's as complicated as ever. If you like reading hardboiled private eye books, this one fits the bill.

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.

The Lomg Goodbye is a Noir genre by American author Raymond Chandler. The book was boring for the first half but gets good in the second half.